Never mind the crap you're hearing about "Making LJ more like Facebook," "removing clutter" and "improved tools for..."
What LJ is really doing with their site update is this:
They're moving processor load off of their servers and onto our computers. All these kludges with their dancing baloney and visual stuff you see -- ever so slowly -- are scripts that LJ feeds to your computer, so that you are doing the donkey-work of data processing instead of LJ.
They're stealing your CPU cycles, is what they're doing.