Hi Inspiring,
Sorry I couldn’t answer earlier but I’m Europe and it was late in the evening when I got your comment. I understand your disappointment with the redesign - likes and dislikes are pretty subjective and as StevieD noted, users frequently dislike change even if it’s for better. It’s really subjective.
I personally like the not so new anymore design of SitePoint just because it isn’t a showcase of what every single technology under the Sun can do if we put it on our site. I am a fan of mimimalism and this inevitably influences my likes and dislikes. In fact, I would hate it, if SitePoint or any other design magazine made their site fat just for the sake of using all the latest and greatest stuff in tech. There were a couple of design/dev sites that did it and I felt about their redesign the way you felt about SitePoint’s redesign. I was especially irritated by their incredibly high load times and broken scripts that prevented the articles I was about to read from loading before my patience timed out. 
In fact, I frequently have discussions with other designers, who would go for design glory on site with lots of text and don’t agree that all these design and programming masterpieces on page actually hurt readership. A predominantly text site should have design and programming to the min and text is king. Anything that makes it harder to read, longer to load, or distracts is not welcome. The design of a text site works best, when it’s almost missing. I know this is boring from a designer’s point of view but on a text site text, not design, is king.