small changes to the theme & sidebar troubles

hey,
thanks for such a great theme!
it’s really amazing – something I’ve been looking for for a long time.

I wanted to customize it to my needs a bit and have several comments/questions etc.

my local WordPress version’s 3.5.2 and the browser’s Safari 6.0.5.

1) <title>
<title> is empty on the homepage and cut short on post pages: ” » post title”.
according to http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_title I made some changes to the theme:
header.php line 14:
<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

2) gravatar
gravatar doesn’t really work – but it didn’t work for me also in another theme (worked on ryu theme though). it might be a problem with my php configuration really (?), so I just inserted an <img> directly in the header.php 😉

3) animate.css
I don’t really like the animations – so I just removed .animated .fadeInLeft from #sidebar and disconnected animate.css from functions.php, line 109. is it alright? shall I do something else with it?
(not to mention that animating breaks the template completely on older browsers!)

4) hashtags
insted of “Category Tagged blabla, blabla” I wanted it to show “Category #blabla #blabla” on the homepage below the posts.
content.php changes:
121: <?php $tags_list = get_the_tag_list( ‘#’, __( ‘ #’, ‘required’ ) );
125: <?php printf( __( ‘ %1$s’, ‘required’ ), $tags_list ); ?>

5) comments styling
to be honest I don’t like the way comments look too much.
5a) the header – too big and unnecessary. insted of “X comments on <postname>” I just used “Comments”: removed lines 18-20 from comments.php and added:
<?php echo __( ‘Comments’, ‘required’ ); ?>
…and changed from <h2> to <h3>
5b) for each comment I changed the style a bit.
style.css 670: padding: 15px 20px 0px;
style.css wherever: .bypostauthor { background-color: #f1f1f1; } .bypostauthor .comment-author { color: rgba(55, 160, 150, 0.4) !important; }
style.css 649-651: lines removed so “Leave a Reply” looks exactly same as “Comments” – because they are logically on the same level… 😉

6) searchform
searchform.php is called only on 404.php – such a shame! I wanted to put it in the #sidebar, so – I put this in header.php after #navigation:
<div><?php get_search_form(); ?></div>
now that doesn’t look too good, does it? I could always ermhmhmm remove the “Submit” button (everybody presses enter anyway!) but I’ve noticed in the style.css that you actually intended to include searchform in the header – why <did you remove it? any plans on doing it yourself? well, I think you might do better than I 😉
another thing: when you search for a phrase that’s not used, a broken 404 template appears – inconsistent with the look of original 404.php page. I don’t think that was intentional.

7) the last thing that caused a lot of trouble:
I desperately wanted to make sidebar a sidebar – I mean, put “archives” and “categories” below gravatar and blog title. it went quite okay – but when I created many categories it became longer (taller) than #sidebars height. alright – so I changed CSS: position:fixed to position:absolute, height:100%… started playing with #footer’s paddings and margins, which broke the effect a bit… and I’ve destroyed my copy of the theme 😛 and had to reinstall. I find this too hard for me to do – at least today. do you have any ideas?