Yes, definitely the looks are of lesser importance now. Some of my other observations this time having more to do with usability:
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When I choose a category from the main page at http://www.sitepoint.com/community/ and then hit the back button in my browser the scroll position is not remembered. However, it is remembered on forum pages with topic lists and posts.
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I am surprised to find out that navigating the new forum is much slower than the old one - the pages take a long time to render. Most of the time is not spend on network connections but on the browser doing some heavy (javascript?) work to render the pages. For example, from the page at http://www.sitepoint.com/community/category/php I go to this discussion http://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/only-get-documents-where-id-of-person-logged-in-in-array/41501 and the latter page takes about 5 seconds to render in Firefox and SeaMonkey during which time the browser locks up and I see the black “loading” icon and my CPU usage goes up to the full (it’s 50% of my dual-core). In Chrome the same thing takes up about 10 seconds (so much for Chrome being faster, btw.). All this ajax stuff combined with dynamic page rendering with js seems to be very taxing and overall is noticeably slower than traditional html pages. Actually, when I compare the speed of standard forums side by side, the sitepoint forums are slow in comparison.
I would like this to sound constructive but I’m afraid this is the nature of the beast and probably you won’t be able to squeeze much more speed since all this heavy scripting seems to be the underlying engine of the forums. But who knows - maybe there is a way to get rid of some bottleneck?