I'll keep the idea for News and Random Anime in my head, I think those are good future additions.
I tried to make the new WoA keep the look of the original as much as possible. I had to change the look a little for a couple of reasons.
The homepage now allows comments, where in the original WoA there were no comments on the homepage, only on profiles. So I wanted to keep space open on the homepage for comments.
Also I had to keep mobile devices in mind now when designing the look of the page. I really liked the look of the original site but it was awful on mobile devices. It basically just shrunk the entire page as much as as possible and made everything too small to be useful and you had to scroll to the right to see the rest of the site. Now with so many people using mobile I have to make sure the site works and looks good on mobile.
By the way, if you happen to have any screenshots of WoA2, I would love to see those too. It might bring back some bad memories for me, but I'd still like to see them.