I have said this before, but ... if we are going to talk (once again) about the possibility for serious improvements to this site, I believe that we should focus on taxonomy improvements; not mere appearances.

tax•o•no•my (n): the practice and science (study) of classification of things or concepts, including the principles that underlie such classification.   (WikiPedia, of course)

Fundamentally (IMHO™ ...) PerlMonks has two primary missions:

1. To enable people who have new questions, and who choose to ask them instead of searching first, to get the answers that will ... well-l-l-l ... get their a*ses out of a furnace that is all too familiar to us all.
2. For those who do search, perhaps many years later, against a database of responses that by-now stretches back more than a decade, to help those searchers find the best possible answers with the best chances of success.

There are lots of possibilities here which have been explored by many other websites and efforts in the past:   tagging; a retrofit of the “experience points” system into something that would have real search-quality improvement value; an explicit taxonomy/characterization system.   Of course, our situation is in some ways much more complicated:   PM is and always has been a single-focused site; it has a very long history (database); the single-subject (Perl) of that history is a constantly-moving target.

So, yes, there are things that we collectively could do to make PM an even-better resource than it already is today.   But “cosmetics” are probably not too high on that list.   (Yeah, at first glance it might look dated, but upon second glance ...)   And-d-d-d ... I, for one, am, quite frankly, not too sure that “some more modern (sic) forum engine,” whatever-it-is, will actually fit our(!) rather special-purpose bill.   Yeah, I think that we as a very-experienced collective ought to be Meditating about these things, perhaps more than we now do.   But I also think that we are all experienced-enough to know that, if/when we decide to do anything about this, it’s just not gonna be quite that simple.   “How to make PM a Better PM” is a worthy and maybe long-overdue goal, but “the Devil will be in the Details.”

Perhaps the best path forward for this community is, indeed, “to do nothing.”   To recognize that we really can’t get our heads together to (a) agree how to actually improve the site and (b) actually turn that into an implementation.   (Hey, as if Perl-6 isn’t already enough egg on the face?)   Tim Vrooms original efforts, all those years ago now, might indeed prove to be the best outcome that any of us can pragmatically™ hope for, such that we should merely continue to keep well enough alone.   Perhaps, as the cobbler’s children, we cannot, in fact, improve upon our own shoes?

(And now, let the down-votes begin!!   They are, after all, much easier pickin’s than picking up my profferred gauntlet ...)