Not to disparage your coder skills, but I think this is a good example of why the "brutalist" style of HN is superior. In exchange for a 5MB deluge of scripts that takes 20 seconds to fully load (actually it just jumped up another 3MB while I was typing this) and a 20s finish time I get maybe ~3 HN entires on screen at a time, versus the main site where I get 20+ entries on 50kb of resources Also drop the google anal…
I actually appreciate how they approached their aggregation. It's pleasant to the eyes, is readable, and adds some visual interest to the feed. Little excerpts and thumbnails better help me decide whether or not I want to click on a link. I don't think information density (in actual space) is as valuable to me as it is to you, though.
These days I often scroll past pages of hacker news without clicking on anything. I used to check out the comments often. But now no longer. The snippets seem revitalize the site for me a bit.