It would be nice to have more than just a single page of 'new' content, since as is, it can even be hard to check out all recent posts from the past few days [...] more of a user's posting and commenting history
Done :)
I was a bit bothered by the noisy look of the front page, so I took a shot at restyling it: screenshot, pastebin. Not insisting that you should use it (I'm using it as a browser stylesheet anyway) but just thought I'd share.
Edit: whoops, this affects other pages in surprising ways. I'll try to fix it tomorrow.
Might as well go with a bang.