Anyways, his redesign is indeed visually heads and shoulders above the original. Bigger fonts, bigger buttons, clearer section delimiting. It's just so much easier on the eyes.
Zappos should revert (most of) his content changes and adopt the graphical changes, that would be a win-win.
Ultimately, customer satisfaction comes from getting the greatest value/deal in the least amount of time. No body actually enjoys the act of shopping. Just ask your mom or girlfriend how they feel when they spend hours shopping and come back empty handed.
Perhaps the author redesign could enable faster transaction. It doesn't sound like he's going for that direction though.
No, great shopping expirience is having an awesome interface that helps you to find what you're looking for as fast as possible.
Big text, big buttons and a clean layout help a lot.
Notice what he did to the blue button bar at the top? This is one of the changes that should get adopted immediately, it's a no-brainer. It looks better and works better than the original.