Bravo for wordpress redesigning their full admin responsive, and mirroring that effort on the front end with the 2014 theme. They're pushing everyone in the right direction, although I'm sure the transition will be naturally frustrating for tons of ppl...

Make no mistake, the best thing about this theme is the clean responsive design on mobile / "accessibility"

The web default sizes leave a lot to be desired, but that's a skeleton design for you, it's not meant to be 100% polished - that's where the child themes come in. But, if you start with this theme, you're doing yourself a huge favor on mobile having that all in place. How much of a favor? A growing amount, starting at about 25% - 35% of your current traffic, if your site is like most.

The small column width is strange looking at first when the rest of the page is empty. I think that small column width is intended for the featured post with large image, it's supposed to cut up into it underneath the main tiles and next to the right sidebar - in that context it does look pretty nice. If you don't like that 3 column format, just make a custom full width template variation to your liking but work with the responsive settings and you'll really be ahead of the game for 2014.

This year mobile and tablet traffic is going to be between 30-50% for most sites! It's an annoying transition if you have a site that has a complex HTML structure with fixed width.... starting with this theme really gets you a head start there and it does look clean on mobile.. maybe it's time to just cut over to a new theme from scratch and make a clean start this year?

All you really need to do for any blog is create a child theme, change some colors, and just don't messy it up and it will look great for the mass amount of phablet traffic coming this year :)

I'm just now trying out customizing the base theme on a new site mystyleplatform.com ... Check back in a couple days or a week or so and see how it changes from today's default install :)

I'm excited to see what custom themes come out based on this responsive layout, I bet this year's theme marketplace is going to be awesome, lots of pinterest style sites to come with this new default featured tiles layout I'm sure.