Here it is: the release I have been teasing all week. Gone are all the things I could think of were useless regarding the core goals of the site (writing, statistics, interaction). I'm quite happy about the results. The site looks much cleaner now. And this was just the initial cleanup!
The most notable changes are the removal of favourite -feature, simplified editor page and the page header. In addition to those and few other minor tweaks there was also quite substantial cleanup on the code side as well which brought the site weight down nicely. But I'm sure there is still plenty of things to remove, especially in the code, I know I can do better.
Next step is to start adding new features again. This time I need to make sure they are all in line with the core purpose of the site. It might become hard occasionally when I think I have some great ideas and try to justify adding those despite them not fitting into the constraints I have set to myself and this site.