you've got to get over the nostalgia of the old site.
Personally, the new design isn't that bad (except for the link color, the background image, and html+css code), it looks much cleaner. And I like clean sites.
Those screenshots Brizz posted are of a somewhat redone layout of the current dtyle by me and PJMODOS. PJMODOS redid the current design to be more flexible (as a proof of concept). I finished it some more and made a few exmaple skins to show off the more flexible code for the same look. Specially the "metal" skin was a quicky, took me a few minutes to find an acceptable metal texture on google.
You can take a look for yourself to see the "fixed" code (e.g. XHTML1.0 and CSS2.0 correct):
http://unreal.student.utwente.nl/beyondunreal/
I haven't bothered to create a skin that mimics the old design, but it should be possible (to some extend).