• better use of lateral space to show more content
• Gallery preview
• Showing of user favorites and favorites preview
• Not having to scroll up to see the banner
• smaller size for text and buttons on desktop for more usable space
• separation of "shouts" from activity updates from new submissions

personally I would just remove activity updates altogether since it allows people to spy on everything you do but that suggestion is not layout related and I already voted it up somewhere else.

I was gonna make a layout super similar to this but you beat me to it! :P
Also, only thing to add is, where you left blank on the right side there should be 2 grids:
one for the gallery
one for favorites

This should provide a quick overview of what kind of art is there in the gallery and favorites pages without having to go to them explicitly.

well it looks like some things here should be merged :P

this! also provide filtering by type of notification in the notification view itself:

The thing about character drawings only being in special folders on your main gallery is perfect, no need for an entire new user page for a new character.
Also "the character tab" is the way to go, add this to your main profile and list your characters there and their atributes, linking to you gallery character folders for their respective art.

^ this
you wouldn't need to rewrite database info for images, since the file itself doesn't need to have flags with it.
Instead, store the flags with the user :

• When artist A uploads a pic give a field to enter @user flags for appearing in the pic, collab etc
• users that were mentioned are notified if they want to add pic to their gallery
• system saves a pointer to the image on the mentioned user's gallery
• when user's gallery is loaded system loads image from 1 place using pointer

That way the gallery code can filter the ones that are pointers and something like a "comissions" filter on the right side near the collections can be added easily and cheaply:

These are just suggestions since I don't know the detail of FN's structure, could be much harder irl to implement.

Exactly, maybe this system should just be deleted completely instead.. well it's in voting!

Well apparently after all that is done the button next to "Commissions Status:" is still "closed" ...
do i dunno what is goin on

Go to that comissions page and click Received until you see this

then just follow the steps

This is majestic, and how I would do it myself.