"I still haven't figured out what the heck is going on with the new interface"
It surprised me too - I had been away for almost a week. A few things that bothered me right off the bat: "Hide Resteem" is gone, and Search does not function at all!
For my current post I needed to find one of my posts from early January, and scrolling for it would have been easy hiding resteems, then I went to search, and got no results, testing search, I got no results for anything at all. So I tried googling and a Steemit post is now far off in no-mans-land (with all kinds of results from other Steemit associated sites prominently first).
The only good new and useful is the Notification tab.