It's just that one gradient in the background.

I agree with your overall sentiment, though. You know, often times, I find sites designed like that really uncomfortable to use. I can't explain why. Everything is too nice, and too slick. Maybe it's like taking a friend's ferrari out for a spin and being afraid to get it scratched - not sure.

The way one of my teachers described it a few years ago is that we get uncomfortable around beauty without purpose. Beauty feels good, but only when there's a logic to its being there. Often it's better to be plain than to attempt overt beauty, because it feels more honest. And that's how Facebook feels to me. It's an honest design.

I agree. A lot of designers excel at making things that are nice to look at but not especially nice to use. I've always thought of this as a sort of "heaviness" -- the design has so much inertia that you're reluctant to manipulate it. This Facebook makeover, with its non-standard fonts and metallic sheen, feels really heavy.

That's usually a matter of a broken design process. Design really needs to start with figuring out what the content is and design decisions need to be based on content and function requirements.

Too many times, I see a designer use stock images and "lorem ipsum" text, which leads to a design that looks good, but once it's built it won't feel right.

The same goes for this Facebook redesign. The most important content of the feed pages (people's status updates) is de-emphasiced (light grey) and really small. Functional items are also grey and uppercase, which makes them hard to read. Etc, etc.

I still appreciate the effort and thought that goes into it. They should do a few rounds of feedback/iteration and this could be very cool.

I have an easier explanation: they're not closing the feedback loop. The problem here is that they've designed this thing in-place, without the benefit of having Facebook's reams of trends and existing user data - nor have they been able to test each of their assumptions in the real world.

Designing without a feedback loop will make very pretty products on paper that utterly fail in real life.