you people should be ashamed.
Well, I for one am not ashamed. My comments are from a software developer's point of view.
There's more going on than just a format change. The old site was quite obviously home built. Someone went through a lot of trouble to set up and test all that code and ended up with a functional site. Since it was homebuilt it was by necessity simple and effective.
The new system is pieced together with stock development tools. This is not in itself a bad thing, in fact it's often a good thing because things are more standardized and require less maintenance. But the idea here is clearly not just to be more maintainable, but to be bigger, flashier, and more like gunbroker. And as previously posted, the user base liked gunsamerica precisely because it was not gunbroker.
It's the same difference as exists between craigslist and ebay. People don't go to ebay for deals, and they don't go to gunbroker either. They go to those "big corporate" style sites when they need something NOW. Gunsamerica was a browsing place where you'd run into unexpected deals. The effect here is that the user base is losing the unexpected deals, and there's no other site that's doing it that way.
Then there's the fact that none of it works. Free or not, that's just bad form. The only other sites I've ever witnessed doing this are government run sites like DMV's. A gun site that functions like a government site doesn't jive at all in my opinion.
As far as being a polite society, well, nobody's going to shoot me through my screen, and that's the internet for you. Things are actually much cleaner on this board than on others, but these people are going to say what they're thinking, if not what they actually mean. They're saying it in sound bite form instead of doing what I'm doing, which is making sure nobody will read my post. And I for one think they should pipe up and keep it short. Otherwise we'd all still be drinking New Coke.