It is in our minds. If you make radical changes like that you always end up getting as many complaints from people who liked it the way it was as you do compliments from people who like the new one. One idea we had recently was to make a new version that was optional to change to. We might do that eventually.
That is good to know. I agree that whenever you make a big change there will be a ton of people who hate it, I remember when reddit made a change to the new one there were tons of people who hated it, and there are still people who use the old version even today, which you can reach by typing "old" on the start of the website, so they do give that right to people who want to use that but it has been years and I can't imagine using the old one now, the new one is so much better for me.
I think same could be done here, create a new design, give the old one like you said, and just never remove the old one, keep it there forever, and that way you could make people like me quite happy and I am 100% sure there will be people who will not be happy about the design change at first and then slowly get used to it so much that they can't go back to old one.