As a hardcore, super-engaged user they don't care about you. The point is not to cater to existing hardcore users, but to create new ones. If you're using every facet of the site as it exists, of course redesigns are going to be painful. There is simply no room to add stuff. All they can do is move things around, and this is hard when you have muscle knowledge of where things are.

As a casual user (former developer back in the goldrush days of mid '97), I immediately felt like I was getting more interesting information. That's just one opinion obviously. I'm not sure why you say less people will see a note... I don't see any evidence of that. But clearly it seems things are simplified and content is fresher, these two factors can only benefit them with their target audience.

I will agree with you that the new design needs tweaks. They do need to bring back enough configuration to suit the power users needs. Overall though column arrangement of Filter Buttons, Firehose, Highlights strikes me as a move in the right direction engagement-wise.

Really? With the old feed it was only updated every N minutes. Say the feed refreshes every hour or two, for the sake of argument.

Users who are more engaged than that see a stale homepage.

Facebook is pretty data-driven, so I'm sure that have a whole suite of metrics that tell them this is a good move. At least I hope so.

Put another way, with the newsfeed there was an engagement ceiling. Letting your hardcore users be as hardcore as they want keeps them there.