After some slight modifications I am actually starting to like this theme. I am probably just going to end up redesigning the landing page and the header and sticking with this theme. The blog text is now much cleaner and easier to read. That was my biggest gripe with the old design. Also the sidebar looks a whole lot better.
And with the addition of WordPress I get a whole bevy of new features. So overall it has been a win. Now I just have to transfer the app pages into WordPress pages and transfer the domain names to point to this server.