Ace,
The changeover occurred about 6:00am this morning (Saturday, 13-April-2013).
As others have alluded to, the old "Home" page was a long abandoned (by its authors) product and unsupported holdover from our older pre-2012 vBulletin 3.8.x site. It was only ever intended to be left up for a few months to give members uncomfortable with all the sudden changes something familiar for awhile until they had a chance to get accustomed to the new site format. Unfortunately, this old holdover was no longer supported by anyone and was the cause of many ongoing headaches for us from a maintenance point of view, and even a security perspective as unsupported software, because it was fundamentally incompatible with virtually everything with respect to our new vBulletin 4.x site. In fact, it required a number of hacks just to make it appear to work to our members. As such, it's demise has long been "written on the walls", so to speak (i.e. it had to happen)!
The new layout is the "official" vBulletin 4.x look and layout and is what we will be using from hereon out so that everything is, for the first time, now fully integrated with our present vBulletin 4.x software. For better or worse, there is very little room for practical changes to the layout.
I'm not sure why you are finding it harder to read unless perhaps you are using an undersized window or display device -- the minimum width display/window that this site is designed to support, from a practical perspective at least, is 1024 pixels in width and 600 or more pixels in height. I wish we could reasonably support even smaller displays, but that becomes very problematic very quickly when you get too much smaller than 1024 pixels in width. If you are viewing the site in a less than full-screen browser window, then you may wish to increase the width of your default browser window until it is 1024 pixels wide or wider (FYI: 1024 pixels is a little greater than 50% of the width of a typical modern 1920x1080 HD flat panel display).
The new Home page now allows you to go back in time up to 15 days, rather than limiting viewers to only the 50 (or so) most recent threads, so it should be a real improvement for members who don't check in every day (which is a good percentage of our membership). Although it *looks* like the "What's New" page (and the "What's New" tab is highlighted), the "Home" page's behavior is identical to the old "Home" page and, unlike "What's New", it preserves a listing of both *read* and unread threads (not just unread threads) -- which was the primary complaint from members who did not like the "What's New" listing.
Give the new look some time and it should grow on you. All the same information is displayed and with a slightly larger and easier to read font size and with less wasted whitespace there is less scrolling as well.
Thank you very much for sharing your feedback with us. There is not a whole lot that can be changed at present but we always keep past feedback in mind when evaluating future alternatives.
