No visual indicator that you have new messages, until you hover (painfully) over the icon? I am staggered that MN could find a way to make the PM system worse than it already was, but - congratulations, you have.
I'm doing some user-centred design at work at the moment so this is really riling me, but can MN please (a) reverse this change and (b) consider putting a user group together in order to validate changes before they are shoved into live?
For MNers who do a lot of PMing in support of shared initiatives like Woolly Hugs (clue: a different persona from regular users) this change adds a significant overhead to managing the projects.