Visual quirks and inconsistencies aside... It's nice to see Pokémon sub-forums at the fore. Thematically it makes a lot of sense to have them presented as such. Aside from that, I'm inclined to think the forum is less usable to new-users now.
Joining a new forum should be fun and you should feel as engaged as possible as early as possible. With this, opening your very first thread in Meet & Greet should be encouraged, and not shoved to the bottom of the index. As a developer I'd even
highlight places of interest on the index/controls using tooltips in a short (optional) site-tutorial for new users. The forum itself is even marketed as a gateway of sorts to new users within its description: "introduce yourself to the community...discover all of the cool things you can do around PokéCommunity". It should really be on top.
Feedback & Support should also be encouraged and not tucked away, if a user is having trouble or wishes to communicate feedback with the forum; the location where they can do this should be very visible.
If one of the aims is to trim the forum size down and make it more accessible & less daunting to new users there's some other things that can be done. The online list for users on both Discord and the forum itself are pretty intimidating and messy in themselves. There's no reason those can't be housed somewhere else equally accessible that doesn't take up vertical space on the forum's index. Same goes for "Member Happenings" and "The Stats" - they're all a bit space heavy. Additionally, "The Bulletin Board" and "Daily News & Original Content" are a bit of an eyesore. There must be better ways to present this visually. I'd push them to the top of the index if I felt people came to PC for their forum-related changes/happenings and news but...they don't. So again, I'd recommend restructuring how this is presented. Make The Bulletin Board work like it use to, as a forum and perhaps integrate Daily articles into the design of the forum as its own panel nice and cleanly. Lastly, if the aim of slimming down the index is a goal here, I'd suggest redesigning the stock footer on most styles. It's obnoxiously large and mostly offers links which are available in the navigation bar anyway. Social media buttons can be better placed, smaller and less invasive while text, logo and the style chooser can all be aligned and sized to allow for better use of space.
My final remark on the index and its changes is that I'm confused as to why the word "Custom" resides in front of "Game Development". It's fairly redundant. It's like saying "Custom Art", "Custom Roleplaying", "Custom Writing" or "Custom ROM Hacking". My best guess is that it's to differentiate it from ROM Hacking, but I think that whole section has the capacity to be tweaked to become more elegant.
I guess it's a step in the right direction conceptually, but I think there's a lot more to be done in terms of trimming front-page noise. The index throws too much at a new user while not guiding them at all. As an older user however, I still feel the index has the capacity to be reduced by almost half, which would focus forums and content a lot better for me.
tl;dr reduce redundancy
