I was the one who designed and coded the old forum skin back when I was still Community Manager for Funcom. To the technically advanced people out there, who suggest easy changes by using FireBug or something to adjust the CSS let me tell you this about vB 4.x: It sucks monkey balls of hell for developers. The old one was already not a wonderfull thing to design/theme, but the new one is so convoluted and chaotic. That's why I didn't use 4.x for the TSW forums. It just would've taken additional weeks to style the forum in the vB backend.
You cannot just use your custom CSS and make due, you have to use their stupidly in-template variables and instead of being a simple copy and past job from Firebug to a CSS file, it's a clickfest. If you touch the templates, you break them for future updates. I can absolutely understand why it would take them ages to adjust the present theme to look like the old one. The old one had so much custom changes in templates and css, that it's just not worth it.
It's a bit sad that vB didn't use the opportunity when they released 4.x to really come up with something new and clean, but instead they kept on doing their 1999 style of layout.
Cheers,
Waldgeist