Many of us have gotten so used to the current layout, that forcing a new one would confuse many of us.
yeah, good reason.
if everybody thought like that we would be all still writing on stone.
Therefore, download times are faster
uhm... can you tell me the address of perlmonks you are using? seems promising =)
Another thing I hate on many sites is the many kilobytes of huge stylesheets and javascript libraries that must be downloaded every time.
well, I partly agree that some pages are just overkill. but usually the referenced stylsheets/js are only loaded once and then read from the cache for a certain amount of time, or the server just returns a 304 not modified.
We care more about seeing the content than the endless amounts of "Like" boxes, Twitter buttons, animates, jquery popups, and the likes.
nowhere did the OP talk about like buttons and the other stuff! let me quote him: "Less visual clutter". you're carrying away the OP's concern to something he never intended.