Having just made the switch from a Forum that has been running since 2002, and now on its third platform, with almost all positive reactions to XF, the single largest complaint is the lack of user preference for viewing order of posts within a thread. This seems particularly problematic after an import where XF has no knowledge of a user's past viewing history. It also is problematic for brand new users without any viewing history. We have active threads going back 15+ years, seriously.
Of note is that this seems to be a very strong personal preference among users, split about 80/20 in our user community between oldest first / newest first. So it was nice that VB gave individual users a choice to set the post viewing order in their individual preferences.
Things such as the New button don't work if the oldest post within a thread is beyond the cutoff date for what defines new.
Given that the display order of posts within a thread is unlikely to change, a button that would take the person to the most recent post in a thread, especially if the posts are paginated, would be very helpful. Otherwise the person needs use the pagination navigation buttons to get to the last page, then scroll all the way down through that page just to find the most recent post. I am noticing that this is particularly non-intuitive to most users given the complaints I am receiving.
Imagine if on Facebook when you first joined a group you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see the most recent post, and the newest was always added on the bottom.
I get it that some people don't like change. I too can boot up a DOS 6.2 PC in my lab because I had 30-year customers still deploying them in critical control systems as recently as 2012. I recently scrapped my OS/2 and SCO Linux machines. My job is killing old systems like a huge CICS system that manages 80 million customers and moving them to modern platforms with cloud services and Angular web apps. So it's not like I'm opposed to change. But for me to succeed I need to make sure that I the users are comfortable with the new, and that we haven't introduced any impediments to them working efficiently.