I still think it's an improvement overall, and I support a policy of "when in doubt, experiment" and "it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission".

Better:

• Meetups!
• highlighting of unread comments!
• Retracting comments instead of deleting them!
• The icons are a bit better than text - well, except for the "reply" one, which looks like a "send PM", but overal I think it's better, it makes it slightly easier to quickly scan through the comments
• The karma bubble is slighly better

Temporary setbacks

• Some people have css cache problems, that should clear up soon
• The comment counts have been lost :( But it should be fixed
• Some bugs in comment submission - it doesn't accept accented characters in locations, which is blatant discrimination against nous les français.

Worse

• The header is uglier than before :(
• There's a bit too much spacing between comments, but that may just take some getting used to (it's not as bad for comments you already read, it's the new ones that have a lot of spacing).