Is this a bug? In my personal opinion -- and forgive me for being picky, but UI design is a professional interest of mine -- if you're going to put the messages and the stats close together on the screen, I would want to colour them differently so they're visually distinct. ie: it adds to the readability of the overall display.

You could well be right. I'd assumed it was to do with long messages fading into gray. They're a little dark for my taste, but it may well be a feature.

It may be. I guess we'll find out from the developers here eventually. :)

It is an intentional feature. I agree that the color might be too dark for some monitors. Any suggestions?

Reversing the position of the stats and the message buffer and having them both white might be okay. (I always thought that stats above message would work best for this display mode anyway.)

Otherwise, perhaps a line of '-' or '=' as a divider might work?

I have to vote against the line of dashes or equals-signs .. that's just going to look messy. Other than that, I don't have a strong enough opinion on the colouring to suggest anything -- I trying to stay with the new NotEye look and spot any issues with that.