If a person like Andy Ruthledge had worked at the NYTimes, he would know that a number of this country's best designers are working on that site, and it's not just a matter of sitting down in Photoshop to do a redesign. You should never lose readers for the sake of new colors. Not to mention how the nytimes.com is an enormous site with layers and layers of interplaying systems. Making stuff like this mostly looks like a young designer saying "this is what you should do", but feels like a young designer saying "I don't have a clue about how things work".