I love the forum design a lot because I don't see any kind of irritative ads on the sides of my screen, no pop-up, easy to read and discuss anything that we wanted. At first, it may look like an old design but once we are familiar with these things then no one is going to say that it is boring. Less traffic is actually due to the merit and ranking system since everyone wants to make money even though they don't have any knowledge related to it.

I don't know how the new forum is going to be but I guess there won't be huge increase in the userbase like social media where people actually register for nothing and wasting their valuable time such kind of members never going to realize the importance of bitcointalk.