General rules of web usability say: maximum information on the front page, minimum gewgaws. And not so many different font sizes, colors and weights (bold, italic, etc). The problem here is that in terms of usability, the FR front page we had until yesterday had evolved to a point of near-perfection in terms of usability over the course of the last few years. (Go look at one of the really ancient FR front pages from, say, 1998 or so at the Wayback Machine web site to see how far we had come.) This means that any massive front-page redesign was absolutely guaranteed to make things worse, at least in the short term.
I have faith things will continue to shake out. But I'm not sure I'll ever like the final result as much as I did the FR front page of last week.