To be honest for a long time I thought Quora was a stack exchange site with a different skin; I only ever saw the q&a pages.

In the article he actually says he took 3 months to get the q&a page design done, interesting that they ended up with a design for that page that is so uncannily similar to SO's.

I appreciate that the reward mechanism is different and I can't comment on the home page as it is behind a signup page, but still, they seriously had never seen SO even in June 2009? Not even a little bit of influence there?