Gary,
While I agree that Adobe's choices of unvisited/visited link colors could have been better chosen, you can easily get around this.
In another browser, say, Firefox, you can override Adobe's settings by going to the browser preferences, choose your fonts, font sizes, and any colors you like for unvisited and visited links, plus the background and regular text colors.
This should take care of most of the issues that you mention. In addition, there are red flags at the end of the subject line for topics with unread posts in them. BTW, I do wear reading glasses and haven't found any of this (OK, except maybe for the specific link colors) to be an issue for me.
Now as far as the page layout is concerned, we've been through several attempted changes over the years, and so far, the navigation and layout as you see it has proven most efficient and most wanted by most forum regulars. We can only wait and see what any future redesign might bring.
Neil