More air in your design? Ehhhh I don't know, partially I guess. Yes, it's a lot lighter in tone, but everything is still pretty cramped up together (thought it is structured, yay for grids), especially the column on the right. To be fair, it's a bit too light in my opinion as for a site that focuses heavily on being a community, I'd recommend a more homely feel. It feels cold now. Yeah, air in your design is good, but not like this. It's not really easy on the eyes when reading bigger pieces of text either, all that white.
The News page also looks a bit...I don't know precisely, but there's a rather disorderly list of subjects below the navigation bar, and below that is another much more orderly list of news subjects. I don't really get the thought behind that. I'd also recommend giving the Latest News section on the front page a more distinctive place, it rather falls apart now thanks to the lack of framing.
However, I really like what you did with the navigation bar and the overall re-structuring of the site navigation, I must say that yes that really increases the site's usability. I would've added a breadcrumb trail as well though, to make it easier to backtrack.