I share your sense that the UX is frustrating here and surprising here. Similar for me is the awkwardness of trying to scroll up and down in a simple 30 topic thread. It’s the one thing about Discourse that embarrasses me.
I do wonder if the balance between good ux in small-medium threads vs not breaking in large threads is quite right. In my project, very large threads are unlikely to be all that much of an issue so it’s frustrating to have ux undermined by their needs.
I remember reading that the real issue constraining the current approach was rendering time on Android. If that’s the case, it seems a shame to hobble all devices based on the limitations of some.
I’d love to know if it’s reasonably possible for a developer to customise:
(1) number of topics per chunk (e.g. vary per device)
(2) keeping already rendered topics visible, rather than the current unloading of them (which makes scrolling back to top clunky)
I appreciate this is a really complex area with no good solutions that a lot of toil has already gone into.