Hey Wonderbolt! If you don't know, I'm the lead developer of PFM now. The entire site was redeveloped from the ground up for this release; and it's important to understand that although it doesn't say "BETA" anywhere it is still considered to be one. Don't get the impression that this is the final release. I personally find "BETA" tags to be... a bit lame, but it may not be a bad idea to add one in to make it clear to everyone that this is still under heavy development.
As far as your feedback; don't worry at all about offending people. Being a professional web developer, I think I've developed some thick skin in regards to user feedback. However, I do get very much irritated at people who are like "oh, it's different and it sucks" and nothing more - but since you didn't do that here, you have nothing to worry about
Before I say anything else I'd also like to point out that the current design was a combination of something I pulled out of my ass while trying to meet the deadline; and some guidance from our designer. The current design is workable for what I wanted to accomplish for the release (to get people to start testing the new codebase), but I knew from day one it would have to be revisited.
I'm currently working with a designer on a new design. We're going back to a layout that has a fixed max-width (it'll still scale down when you resize your window; but it won't fill the entire screen like it does now) as well as placing navigation up on the top. There are quite a few other purely visual things that are being worked on as well that should address many, if not all, of your concerns specifically.
In addition to that, I am working on an activity stream and notifications. The activity stream will be prominently placed on the homepage, and will combine activity from the entire site into an easy-to-follow and interact-with stream ala Facebook or Twitter. This will replace the "recent uploads" part (if you want that information, head on over to the "discover" page) and will be made to be less visually dense than the current setup. At this point I'm thinking of a design similar to Twitter. More on that in a bit.
The activity stream will combine comments (on anything from tracks to profiles), favorites, new uploads and follows. I've designed a pruning and aggregation algorithm over the last week that will remove duplicate information and address issues such as a single user spamming it.
The most important part of the activity stream is that it is interactive. Tracks will have players, and when you play them, will expand to show the download and favorite buttons as well as comments - and a form for you to submit a comment right there. Same with albums, playlists and profiles. The idea is that this should be where a user spends most of their time on PFM if they are interested in keeping up to date with it. The hope is that this will address the concern that PFM feels too "static" and doesn't offer many places for interaction at this point.
Also; at this time, the stream will be global. I hope that one day PFM has enough active users to have it only display activity from people you're following; but that isn't the case right now.
I don't have a release date for these features; but I wanted to make it very clear to everyone that we are listening to feedback as well as implementing our own ideas for how to make PFM better - they're just not 100% ready yet
Thanks!
Nelson