Great question!
Although my feedback is short and telegraphic as I need to sleep early morning tomorrow 
am. Here goes..
I’ll start by answering some some of the questions you bullet pointed above.
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Yes I use it often especially the popular links section because I feel that if you don’t read the discussion fully, the useful / popular links are where you are most likely to discover something interesting.
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The position seem logical to me. A topic map helps you at the start of a long topic. I’ve never thought of having something like this in the middle or the end of a topic. For example you wouldn’t open a map up at the end of a hike [1]. This links well with the 3rd question
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I was envisioning the topic map to look something like this. Obvious but at the same time tucked away as sometimes its in the way with too much information on it.
A lot of the info provided is probably overlooked eg created , last reply etc. as it seems kind of irrelevant? Most of the info like amount of posts, date created & last reply can be seen in the topic timeline. However, I like seeing the views, users and likes.
Unless you wanted to make sure you have arrived at the right place
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