I'm sure there's a lot that can be done to improve just about any site. As everyone probably knows already, I'm a big Palm Addicts fan also, and I do like the way it's laid out. The load can take a little time, but it beats having to go to another archive page to get the days news. Sammy is a victim of his success... too much great news and only so much screen to put it in!
I do think all the banner images probably bring a considerable amount of revenue, so it's hard to argue with that. But more importantly, MobileRead gets to be one of the "favorite sites" images, making me a happy camper with any layout of the images!
As far as adblock, I used to use it with Firefox and loved it. But unfortunately it doesn't seem to be compatible with my 1.0.2 version. (It tells me so when the extension tries to load and fails.)