I would argue the only significant area for improvement is in fact the compactness. There is too little whitespace on the listing pages to easily read the links

I would argue the only significant area for improvement is in fact the compactness. There is too little whitespace on the listing pages to easily read the links, the fonts are small and the lines of text are too long. The latter can be fixed by browser zooming-in, if you want to make your users take actions to read your content, the former needs css.