Great ideas. I've been collecting electronic feedback like this from friends, but agreed that some "over the shoulder" user testing could help. Hearing these "x was not obvious" from you is helpful as I'm too deep in it now for any of these to occur anymore.

A big gripe (I didn't mention in the blog) of the other sites were massive amounts of confusing AdSense, so I was almost thinking a single cleanly branded "sponsor" to pay for the server costs if it gets enough traffic.