There is certainly a lot of work to be done, and I agree that not all of the effort should be applied to aesthetics. If you think content is of value to you, then how about contributing in that area?
A name change is a bit drastic, especially since it will be difficult to grab a domain name. However, OACS is doable for the sake of a logo.
The logos above were created in about 10 minutes just for the fun of it. The purpose of which was to stimulate ideas and discussion... I think mission accomplished. We are still a long way off from a site transition, but at least we are starting to see some active contributions.
We have forums, a wiki and a blog. The forums are very active, but the blog and wiki aren't. The latter two need a presence on the front page. Going with the three column design, the teasers on the right should contain forum threads, blog entries, and latest wiki postings or most viewed wiki pages (using the Views package).
We should also think about displaying open bugs on the front page. I know it may come off as a negative, but all software projects have bugs, lets not hide it. I think it might be good as a constant reminder of what bugs need to be fixed. It may also coincide with the WorkerBee concept discussed in this thread. It may also make the release process more visible, as the releases are generally delayed by open bugs.
By having all this on the front page we will be able to showcase a lot of OpenACS packages or at least provide a segue to a few of them, such as forums, wiki, blog, bug-tracker, news, notifications.
