I'll give the contrarian viewpoint then.
Beta is not usable on my laptop. It is not useable on my 27" desktop. It is not useable on my tablet. It is not useable on my phone. The problems you see on mobile still happen on a 27" monitor with a fullscreen browser.
The images are what many of us here consider "dumbing down" the site. It is tricky, but things eventually turn into sites like sfgate.com, where all the news is suddenly a slideshow without any actual content. Being able to integrate photos into the summary makes some sense for a few of the stories. I remember trying to find an old story about the Corel Netwinder (wow... was that really 15 years ago?!) and wanted to see a picture of the thing. (Couldn't remember the name of the product at the time.) But, 99% of what people are reading are text comments, so how important is it really?
For an example of what some of this crap leads to, take a look at airliners.net. A very miserable experience in a discussion forum, which a few very simple things keep /. from becoming. A few of us in the "audience" do actually care about that stuff.
I'll offer a few of my thoughts for Timothy and Soulskill:
-Content first. Information density. No video!
-Quality and relevance gives value to content. Relevance in deep nested threads is still relevance; the existing system today does a great job there.
-Information portability. Ease of access, be it via search engine of a different device... or read outloud by a robot overlord.
Good luck; seems like you have your work cut out for you!