Update:
Nicole & I have been griping to Nick Denton at Kinja about the "redesign", and he has been good enough to address a few of our concerns. It's surprising in this day & age that you can get actual replies from a company's head-honcho, let alone get your concerns heard, so I doff my cap to Mr. Denton for that.
As of today, the "new" Kinja is no longer ugly AND useless, it's now just ugly. And as odd as it sounds, mere ugliness is a huge improvement over what things had been like the past couple of weeks.
http://kinja.com/user/gaeilge