It's much better functionally and feature wise. Specially on mobile.
The color pallet needs some attention. The color is purple to me as well. Everyone sees color differently and everyone computer monitor and/or phone displays color differently as well so to those who set the colors it may be UK blue to them. It definitely needs addressed though. Also, there needs to be some contrast to help break it up just a bit more. Everything is the same color, threads, avatars, menus and headers. Also the Read/Unread differentiation. Once everyone or most have avatars that show next to the posts I think that will help a lot. All of the generic circles all run together. If anyone saw the Chrome extension that was posted, that helps a ton and I think should help influence changes to the default appearance.
I know everyone was used to the old style but it was on 10 year old tech that was out of date and needed updated bad. Most will say they don't like it just because it's different and not what they are used to. In a few months everyone will be used to it and if they went back to the old, you'd see how archaic it was.