Fugliness

My take on the fugliness has more to do with how chunky the whole thing is, and how much screen real estate each message takes up. It's got an unwieldy feel about it, if that makes sense. Although I know some folks were more motivated by the shaded background.

Actually, it's just one extra line for the sig/timestamp and the buttons. I hope you don't have javascript disabled though, because then you'll see the buttons in the "More" menu below each comment. That's probably something I should fix.

And IMHO the grey background did add to the "heavy", clunky feeling, but with the white it almost looks like traditional talk pages.