I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.

Nothing has changed. The "flashy web" of the 2000s was ... Flash. Corporates paid premium rates to Flash Designers who couldn't write a line of HTML.

I wonder, though, if there are those who notice a simple, comfortable page.