Thoughts on the new youtube Layout/User Interface

This is going to be a more of an explorative post about the UI of youtube, not a totally fun read unless you are into User interfaces.

So its been a few days since Google revamped the layout of youtube and pushed it across to all viewers rather than making it opt in only.
Interesting to see that they chose to go for an absolutely clean interface hiding everything but the most essential links/buttons from the page. Considering the site had the old layout for over 3 years it must have been a tough call to move a lot of page elements around - especially the uploader and video info to below the video from the right. I find I am totally lost when trying to get more information about the video. Before it was an easy glance to the right to get some meta info like the title of the song/movie clip, the time the video was uploaded and associated tags along with the subscribe button. The most important bits all put together in a neat little box, with the move to the bottom and the separation of the subscribe button to the top the same tasks will take a lot more movements on the touchpad + moving around in the wrong direction.
Previously you could just with 1 click favorite a video but now the same thing requires 2 clicks - click save to then favorites. This isnt that much of an issue unless you used this feature a lot, perhaps through analyzing their logs on the usage of favorites they gathered the damage on moving favorites in a sub menu is affordable.
Now to the comments section. Previously you could view how old a comment was, the rating, and a reply button right next to the comment. Now the same info is hidden away and requires a mouse over. At first glance I thought this more information has just been removed by Google who thought was worthless and decided to get rid of it to clean the page. But it was just hidden away. I find it has been a lot more tedious to move the mouse around on all comments to get such basic information. The quality of a video is judged not only by the number of views it as received but also by the number of comments the overall likes and the interaction between commentators. In this new layout there is no way to know how many comments have been received, the overall rating for the video nor how many threads of conversation are happening. A simple replication of the commenting layout of stackoverflow.com would have been much appreciated.
Another gripe is adding videos to quickplay which is now called a queue. Previously each video had a small + button to its bottom right  which could be clicked to add it to your playlist. This same task now requires you to click on the right arrow at the bottom right AND THEN click add to queue. I dont get why would you require a sub menu for 1 function. Another issue with the queue is everytime you go to a new video, be it in the queue or some other video, the queue collapses and requires another click to expand it. Now this isn't a major problem but if you add another video to the queue the queue expands again and you have to scroll down to look at the list of related videos. Example.