The thing is really that before we changed this we checked and the stars doesn't interfere at all, it's at or smaller than the 120x120 width of the avatars we have. Funny enough stars was actually added to make things look a bit more tidy in a sense but also more organized. Sadly the changes aren't completely finished regarding the stars and how they show, but the main idea is as mentioned above. Admin 7, Global Mod, 6, Mod 5, MIT 4, MOTS 3. A straight forward and clean way on how to handle the fancy stars we have around the boards.
Since it doesn't really interfere with the posts and makes the over all ranking regarding the stars more tidy I didn't really see how a change like this would hurt since it doesn't really affect the forums post and how they show. Might not be the most necessary change in the history of this forum, but I found it reasonable enough to modify in this case. I played around with an smf forum of mine and felt it was more logical to have the stars scaling down from one corner to another instead of in the middle of where the profiles were listed, now the FH forum got the same, and if it's just a question of the ranks being well seen already, I do not mind our mods or even admins being seen even clearer on the boards, as long as it doesn't look ridiculous or just is plain unreasonable.
We will see how it looks when the final changes has been put in place.