I haven’t read through the thread (or looked at other parts of the site for changes), but after posting a reply in another I can say that I think you’ve made the common mistake of taking a forum site that needed a little modification in design and instead largely wiped out what was good about it, what made it easy to look at quickly and use, rendering it visually more difficult to decipher and use. Heck, I couldn’t even figure out how to quote a previous post. Two things that I can see quickly:
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For the past couple of years, browsers have been using extra large font size - 110% or so seems the new normal. That has meant, depending on the browser, 10-20% less on screen vertically (e.g., compare new and old at Yahoo or a news site). If the curmudgeonly user like me prefers to see more at one time and hence reduces the size to the “real” 100% (or even slightly smaller) that used to be standard, your site’s forum text now appears as very small. It’s Opera in my case, which allows a switch in the start string for reducing font size. I had to switch to one of the large size browsers, FF, to make it easier to post this.
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The Community>Forums page has now become visually very busy, while the forum pages (post pages) seem to have even more blank space. In addition, I find having the username spelled out rather than an avatar that requires figuring out and brushing one’s mouse over easier to use over on the right (last contributor post).