Love the theme, but I despise unnecessary animations (such as the weird dance of images loading).

Whenever I think of assessing or creating a design is to repeatedly ask "why?" until the product or service is boiled down to its essence - minimum required "design" to make it functional. Then, the immediate priority should be to make such a design accessible - sufficient contrast, color palette, font size, column width, etc. Aesthetics that emerge from this kind of bottom up approach always in my view trumps superficial top-down design where a designer has some kind of a personal subjective vision of their aesthetics which is then used as a mold to engage in the design process - the latter usually results in a poor overall product or service. This is just a general pet-peeve of mine, not inclined to your work. :)