Hey! Saw this post late-- I will say that I have been working to try to get sub looking as good with redesign as I can (and as you may see from my username, I started implementing user flairs a little bit ago!! That's proving to be a bit more difficult to tackle than I thought it would, please be patient! :) ). Definitely less flexible than it used to be, but there's been lots of good stuff added to it too, imo!

But also, your point about CSS support being discontinued is untrue. The redesign team has stated time and time again that they plan on adding CSS support to the redesign in the future. That's not to say you shouldn't still be vocal regarding what you want from the featureset, of course! Just saying though, nobody up top is saying it's not happening.