For the first one, is the pane with Chris Sell's entry the reading pane (where an entry will be displayed) or is it the one showing your blog? If it's the one showing your blog, then I would like that style much better.

I suppose you can have an option for the "old-style" toolbar for those people who don't like it or whose systems may not be fast enough.

I'm loving three panes; can there be an option to line them up like Outlook 2003?

Don't listen to Dare and keep improving consistency and ergonomics of UI. Old one sucks in so many ways users will be happy to get rid of "legacy muscle memory".

Damit: the right display is my blog, not the detail of the current item. Old style toolbar would mean: it use a different renderer to render the older style toolbar (like that one in VS7.IDE), with the newer SandBar version 1.0.1 it seems to be faster than the first release because of the double-buffering used now.
evariste: if you mean you would like to have the detail pane at the right side as OL2003, this is currently not supported.
George: Dare complains mainly about the "Refresh All Feeds" button that he miss in this design study. I would suggest to build a compromise: we add this button to the toolbar, but make them by default hidden (just no display on the toolbar). Then each advanced user can make it visible agin by checking them on via the toolbar's chevron menu, that settings get saved as .settings.xml.