Hi Caitlin,
I totally understand where you're coming from with your views, I used to be a moderator here at Transtastic and the site was a real mess.
Home page would take over 60 seconds to load and many times up to 3 minutes or just time out, forum and other parts would just time out none stop, and I'm on a 76mb fibre connection.
Now things pretty much work as they should though there are still bugs to be worked on, and home page for me takes about 23 seconds approx to load now, and it is consistently that too.
But yeah, there are still things to improve, was many idea's I had at the time of being a moderator but was shocked to find out it would cost 100's for one thing and 1000's for another.
But I can honestly say from way it used to be when Katie took over the site to how it is now, it is a 1000 times better than it used to be, and I'm sure in time as money comes in it will get even better.
If I was super rich and could say how much would it cost for the following, then pay for it to be done, I've always liked the layout and look of TVChix, is it any better to transtastic or gender society or others? to me yes as it's what I'm used to, to many users who have grown up with the likes of facebook and are used to the full on graphics and picture feeds, then I'm sure they would be saying yewww that looks too plain we prefer transtastic and others .
So it's very subjective, and what you have been brought up with and got used to using.
Blessed Be