Unfortunately, most all busy forums are this way... unless someone wealthy owns it and don't need any outside support to keep it running.
1024x is tough to design around... especially when you have to advertise. If we didn't advertise, we wouldn't have giveaways... and I'm not even sure we could survive with the expenses we have. If every active member wanted to pay up.... donate a buck or two per month, we could eliminate it. Most members aint' gonna pay though... especially not a newer forum like us.
AVS doesn't care... they have a million viewers per day and could care less whether you come back or not... it won't stop a certain number from coming back and newcomers don't know any better.
In the dream world we could probably have what you are asking for, but in the real world, it's difficult to do, not impossible, just difficult.
36-37% of our users use 1024x, 3-4% use even lower, but most use 1280x or higher, which is what we more or less optimize for. Much less space is used in higher resolutions. If 1024x users would just bump up to 1152x, they would see much more on their screens and surfin' the web would be sooo much better in most cases. More and more sites are optimizing for 1280x nowadays as 1024x is slowly disappearing.
Check out
www.hometheaterforum.com in 1024x. The entire page is taken up on every page you go to and on their main page it takes scrolling down about 2-3 pages worth to get to the forum listings.
Check out
www.hometheaterspot.com in 1024x. Ads on top, left and right... really jumbled up.
We actually have an extremely large amount of compliments on our layout and flow. That doesn't mean there won't be a few that don't like it... but it is hard to please everyone. We do however take every suggestion into consideration and are constantly looking for ways to improve things.