The styling of the site name makes it hard to scan. If it’s so essential, the font should be darker and bigger.

That's a fair point, but people have a lot of contradictory preferences about things like that. I think I'd rather address this by allowing more customization of the site. Still thinking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199264.

As I said there, I’d like to see that added

Ah so you did! I missed that.