OP: did it ever occur to you that, with this beta, they are trying to make things work fine first? The style adjustment would come later.
Anyway, let me say this: people's priority is for something that just WORKS. The "yays" you've mentioned were surely for being able to enjoy a *functional* Facebook app, an opposite experience from the current official app.
Ps: that banner is a waste of space, glad it's not there in the beta.
It never works that way. You can't lay out your app and keep building on your beta and then decide you will move your elements around drastically. Beta is only beta for the functions that may or may not work. The design is highly unlikely to change. I've not seen any beta come out as something totally different in looks. Will be happy to stand corrected on this though!
This is a wake up call for those who have interpreted Metro far too narrowly. Metro isn't pivot and panorama. Those are templates for certain apps for a specific form factor for Metro. In many ways, the new Facebook app is not far from Metro at all, and could be a great example of it with a few minor tweaks. Facebook's aesthetic has in fact flattened out recently. At its core, Metro hasn't failed ? but Microsoft has, by failing to provide much guidance for expanding Metro past those two templates from 2010.
The whole idea and selling point of WP was - everything looks like the phone OS - when you are in and out of the app there are ways and design that makes you feel like you never entered an app, it feels like it's all within the system i.e. look, feel, navigation etc like system app. By getting rid of pivots, huge panorama, banner etc - compare this to People hub (where social aspect of OS lies). I would have imagined FB being a social app, will look more like People Hub in near future.
One of the bad things about Metro is screen waste.
Those big fonts at top of music app or Metrotube , waste lot of space.Too much scrolling.
I think MS must re-work on apps which have lists and same with devs.
What you call waste fits totally with the design ideology. If anyone who has been long enough with WP remembers, those big titles and those endless panoramas were touted as design that doesn't bother your content. There is always something peeping at you from your right hand corner suggesting intuitively that there is more content - scroll the panorama and then there is more and more and more! No arrows, no fiddle buttons on the screen - all we have is content. That is Metro to me. That was Metro and that will explain why pivots and panoramas are KEY in Metro!
Right now in beta - you scroll nowhere! You swipe from left and swipe from right, that's all! There is no design telling me there is more content, where is my intuitiveness?
Also, anyone telling me that Metro design wasn't good enough for function rich Facebook is totally under estimating Metro! What has design got to do with how an app functions? Whatever code is required to function can still run, the look of the app will be different.