Agreed. I've often presumed that stats (esp. language and commit counts, etc.) were part of the "social" aspect of GitHub, but not otherwise useful to me in any meaningful way most of the time.

I think the sidebars are a step back for me. I preferred some useful content at the top, now having it on a sidebar just moves that content to the right side, away from my focus.

One positive thing about the change is that "network" and "graphs" are now not co-mingled with main workflow items like Issues and Pull Requests.