Oh!  It took me ages!  Can you be maybe more specific - what is it that you find complicated/impenetrable?  I was trying to get rid of the boring "three column" type layout really.  But there are several things I've learned in the process that could make switching back to something simpler more "interesting" like linking the content of sidebars to what's going on in the main content column, so I could probably go back to that.

As to loading times, I have to say I don't see any issues with it - though occasionally some of the widgets like Adsense, Irreplaceable.info and technorati take a while to load, but in theory, where they are placed (for this very reason) they load after the content.

I'm happy to go back to the drawing board if I know what would make it easier for people to read, though I have to say looking at my logs it does seem to have achieved a couple of useful aims - people are clicking on the "related stories" and "random stories" in the top sidebar and consequently staying around to read more articles than previously, and overall visits have increased markedly - with people reading the "stories that caught my eye" links which are intended to be different - snappier comments on others' stories rather than just my longer "essays" which I thought were putting people off previously.

The reason I wanted to redesign it was because, as you pointed out when yours? was nominated for the design award, most of the work was done by the default Drupal themes so I wanted something I'd done myself. And I've got a few other projects for which I see this as a bit of a sandbox.

I've certainly learned a lot about all sorts of bits of Drupal while doing it - views and theming them, blocks and positioning them and so on. The aim was to break up the content a bit so instead of presenting one long list of content and links there would be one main post followed by blocks with links and listings and that they'd appear in different parts of the page.

I've gone back to the drawing board armed with this new knowledge and am learning a little bit more about theming different blocks based on the region they are in and so on and will be able to put some of the links I think are keeping people on the site reading "related" stories into the nodes themselves which will achieve a similar result.

Though having said all that I've also just discovered how to make expandable "blingy" buttons so that might also slow it down a bit, but I'm going to be a bit more ruthless about external embedded links that call images or scripts from elsewhere as I notice those slow things down. But if everything of that sort is in the right place on the page it should nott disturb loading my content (ie always loading after my important content is already rendered).

I tried turning on CSS caching but it didn't seem to take - and I know my files are being handled the right way to allow it so I'll need to investigate. I can also probably cache some individual blocks and maybe even throttle some if it looks really slow. But I'm having fun! Got a busy week ahead though so not much more might happen till I get another chance next weekend.

It's the best CMS I've used so far IMO - far easier to get under the hood with than Plone/Zope, say, and better built than most of the PHP ones I tried a few years before that.