For every job that needs to be done, there is an element of fun
Well, this can be an interesting discussion, die-hard fans of the oldie goldie CSS Forum would certainly be reluctant to accept the change as our very dear Raz Bhai and Islah_G seem to be. At least this shows that people love and care for this place and this a great feedback in itself. Thanks a bunch.
However, let's see if I have a point to make here. In my humble opinion, we were already facing more or less the same issues that we expect to counter now in this new interface.
People (especially beginners) wanted to be guided at a personal level, so every now and then we had threads created for some specific members and that too for just a simple answer but the thing is that only the answer from that specific member was required. We also had 'dedicated' threads for other general purposes as well.
Similarly we had many good threads turning to gup-shup and eventually the mods had to intervene and delete posts etc. which often caused discontent and was our (the mods') prime source of earning a bad name here.
This was because we had not channelized the so called gup-shup to vent out at some place.
The latest 'value addition' (if you allow me to term it so) is not only channelizing the necessary gup-shup sentiment but can also be used as a tool to communicate something useful and personal at the same time. I think it's a little early to term these features as useless, they have a great potential to be opposite. All depends on the usage and yes, we have good degree of control over the features as well.
All said, these are my personal views in the light of my few months of experience here, you can surely disagree