So yes, the interface to the chat system is MUCH better than before. With that said, Marduke had an AMAZING photoshop of a very streamlined interface and it seems, at least to me, to be the best idea of a chat interface I've seen thus far. I'll Include it here again just for review.

http://www.6thfr.org/Example.png

Actually our new chat interface was heavily inspired from Marduke's mock up and other suggestions from the community in that thread. You can see a lot of similarity in the friends list.

Im going to add a "maximize" button to the chatrooms for the next patch, and that should make it look even more similar.

I think the way they've done it is great, my only issue is the buttons and tabs at the bottom don't really feel like a part of the main window.

They're a different "style"

The new chat stuff looks like it's made of plastics, while the older stuff looks like it's made of stone or steel.

The basic interface of chat/join/profile feels just out of place. This is not what I expected. It feels as if it were form a different generation of gaming, and not from the present or the future. Whatever you need to do, the original graphic re-suggested to you at least looks smooth (as in Blizzard smooth). Sometimes you need to look to your source material for inspiration. Thanks for the read.

My one suggestion would be PvP.net client scaling, the chat windows and buddy lists take up a lot of real estate.

The one problem I'm finding with chat right now is statuses of a certain length are bigger than the actual buddy list can display and there's no other way to see the status of a player so there's a portion of people's statuses that goes completely unread at the moment. Being able to expand the buddy list window when it's undocked would be a nice and easy fix I assume.