I don't think you have understood. We don't want you to slow down. We want you to stop; reverse; appologise for being so out of touch with your user base; and promise to never do anything so stupid again.
Not quite. That's what we THINK we want. What we REALLY want is slightly different.
We don't want you to say you'll slow down, because we hear that as "continue to do exactly the same boneheaded thing you were going to do, just delayed for awhile."
But we don't really want you to stop and go backwards. What we want is for you to make sure that you're not leaving anything important behind when you do move forward. Lots of us have our own little irritations with things we consider to be "broken" in the beta site - my big one is that I couldn't see a way to set up abbreviated comments (where I see only a single line for comments that are scored below my threshold, but I can click on it if I decide I want to expand any specific comment). I have that now, but on the beta site, it appears to be missing. Others have complained about other functionality that seems to be missing. We need to be assured that you're not going to plow ahead without these features.
That doesn't mean you have to go backwards, because Lord knows the old site has some issues that need fixing. But remember that if you alienate your user base in an attempt to attract more users, you'll be left with nothing, because the existing user base is the only thing that makes Slashdot worth a damn. Nobody comes here to read your content, they come here to read ours.