I hear what you are saying but that is a more global question. Should the blog and the website have similar design and branding. I think we decided overall to us e the same design and integrate in navigation wise.

Would it make sense to partially backpedal and remove the red hat branding at the top and bottom? The navigation from one to the other will start to be weird, especially if we remove the top one (misalignment).
I would say, we go with what we have and we discuss it after the release.

About the blog link, I would keep it for consistency, the foot is consistent across all pages.