@cpjust Let me look into doing some of those things. I think the easiest option is to probably going to be some kind of image resizing followed by tweaking the vertical space of fixed elements. To that end, I already removed one of the announcements that I think was no longer relevant (how to move things to the FAQ board). It might also make sense to move the code tag sticky into the announcements section and trim down the vertical space taken up by announcements.
@grumpy Unfortunately, there's no option to do that per-user. However, from what I've read, it's possible to create a new usergroup that disables the friends system and then manually move people into it upon request. The other option is to disable friendship for users who haven't posted much (the people who are currently in our "registered" user group). Are most of the requests your getting from users with < 10 posts?