An imperfect solution, but still I suppose an imperfect solution can be better than none. I do tend to agree with the person in the linked discussion that this really shouldn't be necessary, but sooner or later I'll have to get off that particular high horse if I want to actually use these forums.
The larger issue seems to be that the new design is a bit to "busy" with too many different elements competing for the user's attention. We already have the attention span of a fruit fly with a really bad case of ADD in the western world, no need to try and make it worse. All the core elements are there, and that's good, but this new design still feels like something you'd use as a prototyping UI for making sure all the elements work, and then refine before subjecting the rest of the world to it.
If I had more time I'd consider making my own mock up, but sadly I don't. My initial post here did have a number of suggestions that one could consider constructive criticism, so hopefully those can get passed along to the developers. Along with one more thing: Can we please, please, PLEASE, stop with this absolute positioning nonsense and go to a relative positioning system? So those of us with larger resolution displays don't have these enormous ugly gray borders flanking either side of the screen. On my 27" iMac, each of those two borders is probably about 1/3 of the screen with the window maximized, so only about the middle 1/3 of the display is being used for actual content. And there's no need for this. If you used relative positioning, you could let the browser do all the heavy lifting on the page layout, and it would automatically adjust to pretty much any size browser window there is. People with crappy old low resolution displays, or viewing things on say an iPad or some other tablet, would get largely the same experience as someone like me with a higher than full HD resolution display.
And that stupid bar at the bottom of the screen has GOT to go. Usually I just use AdBlock to get rid of the thing, but those kinds of stupid JavaScript tricks will really bog down older systems. What's easy to forget if you have a fairly high end development system as a web developer, is that every time you scroll up or down the page, the browser's JavaScript engine has to figure out what to do with that stupid bar, and that can suck up an impressive amount of CPU cycles... Which your average dual or quad core system tends to have in excess, but not all those people still holding onto P4s and Athlon64 systems, running an OS where there's no real option for hardware acceleration in the browser to offload some of that processing from the CPU, and the user might be using an older version of a browser with a far less optimized JavaScript engine.
Which kind of gets back to the whole aspect of it just being one more thing that seems to primarily about chasing some kind of web development fad instead of focusing on good solid design, and only implementing those things that make sense for what you're trying to accomplish with your particular site. There's no shame in having a simple, rather spartan, site that doesn't have all kinds of cool JavaScript and AJAX elements, Flash animations, and other whiz-bang crap solely for the sake of being there. Web developers should always be asking themselves whether or not they're adding some feature because it adds to the overall function of the site, or just because they think it's cool, or some OTHER site is doing it (probably the worst excuse possible). If people can't find the CONTENT, which is why they came here in the first place, then what's the point?
And I can see this turned into a rant, so I'll end it here. But I reserve the right to continue when I have more time.