Sorry, but the design looks very sterile. For a site named "WP Tavern", very little here feels like a tavern, and the site seems to have lost its character. It almost feels like someone is trying to set up a bar in a hospital.

Also, it feels counter-intuitive to have recent comments at the bottom in a bid to go "sidebar-less". Not all articles here are of interest to many readers, and the comments in the sidebar helped people jump to the more interesting (or sensational, or contrarian) comments without having to go through the entire listing of posts. And obviously, the number of comments in the byline would help, as others have noted.

The other thing is about printing the category in the byline. E.g. on this post the category is "Tavern". Where do I see the other categories? In fact, there is no way to navigate to the other categories without going through the Archives pages. To stay congruous with the design, either the category in the byline should go away, or the categories should be available for access on each page.