FWIW Matt, I'll take the karma hit and say that I think the new design is nice. There are minor things that could be tweaked, but I can't help but think that all this strong negativity is mostly just status quo bias.

Every time Facebook rolls out a new layout, my news feed fills up with people screaming that they're really going to leave this time, and I get invitations to 5 different "Bring Back the Old Way!" groups. Eventually you start to notice a pattern, and to distrust your Automatic Strong Negative Reaction to Any Change. You let that phase pass, actually put in the minor effort to learn the new interface, and a week later you don't even notice the difference.

There are little things in the interface that I'm sure will fall into place in the coming weeks (for example, I agree with the notions that there's a little too much separation on the nested comments, and that the envelope icon is counter-intuitive) , but overall I think that if you "redesigned" the site in reverse, you'd have just as much (probably more) complaining.

It looks good, some of the new features are really nice, and I see the rationale behind some of the more controversial ones. Thanks.