Done.

I think part of the problem is the number of comments and words in story parts, that information should be separate from the link to click,

That, unfortunately, is hard-coded at the moment. More and more of the page's output is configurable, but there's still a lot to go, and that's one of the pieces that hasn't been fixed yet. Right now, I can't change that line without changing the code behind the site, and there are other sites running from the same code - changing it for this site would look strange on the others... that's why I only recently changed the article voting to publish/abstain/reject - before this update, the vote options were hard-coded too.

Keep some kind of visible distinction for where one lead in stops and the next begin. As it is today it is great; but I've seen the latest trends where some sites don't keep it that distinct, as well as making the sizes of the headlines smaller.

I will. I totally agree with you here. The default actually had a line between the article header and the intro text below it, and no divider at all between the end of the intro text and the next article header. That just wasn't good.

I'll look at rearranging the header with some of the ideas you've put here.

The time format is another hard-coded thing. There seems to almost be a way to change the time format, since a format string is passed around in the code, but there is currently no way to change that. But I think the time zone marker should stay, if nothing else it reminds people if they haven't set their timezone preference yet...

And while I'd like the new members to be more active, there is a very typical 10x difference between active members and lurkers with accounts, and another 10x difference between lurkers with accounts and those without...

There's also the fact that the whole concept of a user-driven site is rather foreign to most people. It doesn't surprise me that most visitors will just read articles and that's it - most writing sites with articles on writing present those articles as references instead of discussion starters, and don't exactly encourage visitors to argue with the author!
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Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
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