Minimalism is at the core of my biggest proposed change, which is the Quick Match UI, removing all extraneous settings that could confuse beginners and divide the matchmaking pool. I further improved on this in multiple ways in UI update v0.2: All-in-one home page / Play page rework .
I think the almost zero amount of upvotes I got on both threads is a clear sign that I did something wrong, but it’s not easy to pinpoint or vocalize what the problem is because I’m so bad/inexperienced at graphic design and I was lazy making the draft. I don’t think the problem is lack of minimalism – I’m a proponent of that too. If you look at lichess.org and chess.com there is a lot more bloat on both their sites whether it’s links to donate or shop or advertisements.
I’d prefer if a mod closes this thread and move discussion to the v0.2 thread which I spent more effort on. The main purpose of this v0.1 thread was to hastily draw up a visual to accompany the walls of text in Home page ideas megathread , because it’s what anoek asked for. It wasn’t meant to be refined or complete in any way.