I know exactly this bad feeling when going to a website with great content and terrible design.

I am pretty sure you know about these, but just in case.

To address this problem I used readability from arc90. Now I use a solarized[^1] version of readable[^2].

Cheers :)

[^1]: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized [^2]: http://goo.gl/jISPf => will go to http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ with solarized theme (my tiny contribution).