Yes, I very much want the avatars back, and I suspect Shawn does too. It's just a simple matter of the feature not yet being available on UBB 6.0 as of yet. As soon as it is available, I'm sure we will have it.
Personally, I found the last design to be much more visually appealing. While this one has more short cuts, I think it needs a bit of tweaking. I'll get used to it