The amount of self-righteousness in this thread is staggering. This is not about "prettiness" or "cosmetic" issues, this is about usability, and PM fails horribly at that. It is entirely newbie-unfriendly and has a worse learning curve than vi (with less justification at that).

Look at the amount of information overload in the homepage. There's a mess of links at the top, mixing account management (logout and username), advanced search (why isn't that near the Search button!), category nodes, and misc. stuff (recent threads, newest nodes) with no distinction. Then there's this utter mess of a sidebar with no differentiation between frequently used and rarely-if-ever needed links (and does "Other users" really need such a prominent place?), along with possibly the world's worst chatterbox in existence.

Now, you might have gotten used to it and "come to love the site" or some nonsense, but most replies here are firmly pretending as if a usability problem doesn't even exist here. The site is newbie-hostile and does not belong in 2013. And when a monk politely wonders why this is so, there's tons of comments getting up in arms against them, and very little actual discussion as to how this can be changed.

There have been a few good suggestions to make the site look better, but they still only "prettify" the site, don't actually solve the usability issues. Also, the average newbie isn't going to know about these (and things aren't easy to find due the above-mentioned overload issue), so their usefulness is hugely reduced due to avoidable factors. If this site were open source, or if we had some active maintanence here, we could do so much better, but no suggestion has been made regarding taking steps towards that. PM is the biggest gateway to the Perl community, but right now it's unusable and very successful at scaring newbies away. Defaults matter, let's get some sane ones in place!