Your channel used to be part of your image and said something about you, like a site within a site, now I feel like they are taking that extra bit of personality away. There's good and bad elements in both designs but I feel like the new channels are more of a scheme to get people aligned with Google+. This way interactivity and personality are more present on other social media sites instead of a YT channel page. The new YT channel pages pretty much emphasize links and clicking on videos. Not so much finding out more, searching videos on a page, interacting and so forth. I just feel like it's a sly way to changing YT's audience/viewer/content creator dynamics.