Dan, my eyes are aging also (I zoom in on almost every web page I read), but what you describe sounds like you might have a local system problem related to an aging monitor or odd display settings in the OS.
I've viewed this site for years from a variety of hardware setups and browsers. Readability-wise, I'm no fan of light-on-dark schemes, but after I zoom in I've never had problems reading the UI elements or primary post text (there are still some white-on-nearly-white quote blocks that I can't read without hurting myself).
If you really get into GC2, I hope you can find a solution to this problem. The in-game info and the manuals are not strong--I've learned far more from reading around here than I ever did reading the PDFs or the UI verbiage.