kogir and I talked recently about getting rid of "unknown or expired link". It's on our list. There are a lot of things on the list; we don't know yet when we'll get to it.
There's work ongoing to make HN more usable on mobile. This will likely roll out sooner than the above. We intend to roll it out incrementally, starting with the front page. We'll give people lots of notice so anyone running scrapers that are affected (like me!) will have time to change.
The look and feel of HN is unlikely to change much. We can argue about that one till the cows come home. I'm tempted to—my opinions are as strong as many of yours—but that doesn't seem like the best idea right now.
Feature requests should go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363. Software bugs should go to https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues. That would have been the appropriate destination for the OP, and indeed this issue has been posted about there.
Threads like the current one get lots of upvotes and comments, but they've never been on topic for HN. I'm going to bury this one now.