It's just for fun. A lot of people love it. A few don't get it at all. The conf will sell out no matter, so there's no harm in doing some different here. That's all there is to it!

Yes, I was very focused on early 90s on this one. Games like Doom, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Space Quest are all part of the inspiration and details from those games are tucked away in the design here and there.

Yep you're right, Laracon is the conference for Laravel, the PHP framework (laravel.com). It sells out every year in about 90 seconds, so to some degree it doesn't matter what it looks like, it's just a resource for those already planning to go (e.g. list of speakers and a schedule). That's why I was able to do something different without worrying it would "work".

The changes weren't arbitrary, each and every one was for a reason - mostly for consistency and convention across the expanded feature set in 2.0.

Yep Statamic would do a great job here. Check out sites on http://builtwithstatamic.com for examples.