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@Velocio
That is interesting.
Our UX tests led us to believe that this is cleaner, crisper, easier to read, easier to find items, easier to see when things have been updated or are popular.
People found the table layout slower to parse.
I wondered at the time whether this was a difference between people who are used to old usenet software that was very grid oriented and from which the early web forums were basically derived... and those people who are more accustomed to the social network style of web sites like Facebook and Twitter.
You'll probably notice that quite a few things feel inspired by Twitter, as that kind of layout is basically where a lot of user expectation is.
I personally, and one other UX test subjects, felt the same as you... that there was a chasm of white space down the middle that felt like it pulled the content apart. But we came back to LFGSS and looked at the average lengths of thread titles and concluded that the data in the sample sites is shorter than real sites and so the gap will be less prominent.
Additionally, you'll note that the event has a "pill" showing the event info within that central space... as we add types like classifieds, those will also present meta data down the middle space which closes the gap.
I do agree with you, but we are in a very small minority as all of our testing has shown the less table-like structure was preferred.