That's not even the half of it. I'm officially boycotting 4.0 till the late first quarter of 2010 when vB gets it's act together, seriously. And even then it's only because I have no choice, business-wise :p

What is the "gold" version?

It is the first release developers consider to be stable enough to be used in a live, active website. Anyhow, early gold releases, in any software, will unavoidably leave large room for bug fixes and further code optimization... that is why I usually recommend to wait a few months after a product has gone gold before adopting it in an already existing website. If you are starting now, that's a different story.

Agreed. I keep checking back thinking they've finished the header and fixed the nav bar buttons but it looks the same. I'm super surprised they put out such an ugly design that looks so unfinished an amatuer. Even the free designs for this version look awful. Atleast with 3.0 the header looks finished not cut off at both ends. And the gradient alt1/alt2 makes the forum looks cloudy and hard to read. Yuck, they did a terrible job designing this and I hope the redesign the whole thing.