>> if I've been "following" a thread with quite a few pages I'd rather see the most recent posts come up when I click on it rather than having to scroll all the way through to the last post.
Lin, if you go to your profile,
then hit:
- - - - - - - "ยป Change your site preferences"
then set this to "Yes":
- - - - - - - - "Automatically jump to the first unread post in threads?"
... then every time you go to a thread you've been in before, you will automatically jump right to the first unread post.
(It assumes that you read every post last time you went into that thread.)