Ask HN: The right level of paradigm shifting?

I just finished off a new forum project and it has a couple of new ideas in it that at the time I implemented them / thought them up I thought were really great ideas, but now that I've seen them actually collide with the reality of a typical end user, I'm wondering if maybe they're just too hard to grasp. I would like opinions in general on this sort of thing. If something makes sense / is intuitive to you, how can you know that will translate over into the end user experience?

The site I just finished is redroom.ojam.biz

The two big ones that seem to be confusing people are the slide out menu on the left hand side that gives a full overview of the content down to the thread level and the view of the replies in topics that goes thread -> last reply -> earlier replies instead of the common paradigm of thread -> earliest reply -> later replies, as well as the way that actually works from a UI perspective, which is if a reply is a reply to a reply, it is highlighted (maybe there's a better way to indicate this?) and when it gets clicked, the other replies are hidden and just that branch is shown contextually. The idea here was that the most relevant and recent information would be shown first in context with the original post, while at the same time allowing you to drill down into the details if you're curious as to how something got to where it is without descending into a case of dozens of indented posts all clamouring for limited space.

I don't claim to be a UI / design expert, I'm mainly a coder, and this was a team effort, I'm just aiming to learn as much as I can from the experience and I'm hoping that people have tips worth sharing here.