It's not only a massive barrier to entry for people who want to start contributing to the project, it's frozen with the features that were available on the web in 1996 and every single modern web feature we or our predecessors have been able to bolt on top of it since then, including such basic things like "leave a comment without having to load a separate page" and "make it possible to choose a user icon and see which icon you chose", is one more layer of things that have the potential to break in modern browsers, needing us to spend hours or days diving into bugs and issues that should be a few moments to fix.

Please, please don't remove the ability to comment by loading a separate comment page instead of using some kind of JavaScript-driven live page-content-resizing -- I'm not using JavaScript, and every time a site does this I lose access.
I've always understood that part of the Dreamwidth ethos was the ability for pages to degrade gracefully; when you accidentally made it impossible to set dates on a post without JavaScript, for example, you apologised and changed it to allow a fallback option.

(And, as others have commented, while I personally am very grateful that this last code push has made it possible for me to post comments again *at all*, the new comment box being only three lines high does make it a lot harder to post well-composed and well-thought-out responses.)