Much prefer it like it was. This is very messy to read and doesn't make best use of the screen. And, yes - it is taking longer to load pages. This does not seem like progress to me. Personally, I still miss the old set up, which ran the topics much better. Active Topics is now not a list of the threads which have changed since you last logged on, but simply all threads from the most recently answered down. Not the same, and not so easy to track topics. We seem to have lost such a lot, just to gain speed of loading.
Before you start, I am not criticising you and the other guys David, I know you do a lot of work to keep things going, but the "old" software did have a lot of great features which made using it far simpler than now. Oh, and I hate those chav smilies, they're crap.