If the behavior is "redesign the aesthetics to be less pleasing, and introduce a bunch of bugs" then I think discourage is probably winning out here...
I personally would prefer to encourage it, since I don't view it as that bad, but I can see where people are coming from here. Especially since the entire membership is being used for rather unexpected live test. I totally understand that at a certain point you have to just go live and hot-fix from there, but a top-level post saying "site is live, please discuss" or at least a solid reassurance of "we will fix these bugs" would have been very nice.
Good now that that's out of the way, let me say I really like the new header, but replacing things like "deleted", "report" ect. with pictogram's is unnecessary in my opinion.
The new nesting seems less aesthetically pleasing, though I think that is outweighed by it being easier to follow so that's a good change.
Thumbs up and thumbs down however seems to me, to have a different implied meaning compared to up vote and down vote. Is this a bug or a feature?
Edit: One month later the pictograms seem a much better idea than they where at first.