The fact posting does not have to go via categories is a big improvement; and it does look better in general, BUT:
As I see it, the space for every post has increased massively thanks to the poster info on the right being bigger; but the text is the same, too small, size and the same vile and hard to read, grey colour. And worse is the fact that if I increase the text size the poster info is not viewable.
I will read, and post, regardless; but if you are going to have massive text space (and you do for every single post now) make the default font size at least one point larger.