I noticed another reason for being able to move directly between knowledge explorer and the normal view. I’m using this brilliant theme component by @joffreyjaffeux.
Unfortunately when I view a topic within Knowledge Explorer, this theme component doesn’t work. I’m super sad about that since we use this theme component basically exclusively in knowledge documents.
Maybe an incremental UX fix would be to put navigation links at the top of the topic? I put “Edit” and “View Discussion” as the navigation links, but I imagine other links could be “View First Post” or “Reply”. I’m not sure what the balance is between simplicity and efficiency. Personally what would be most valuable to me would be “View First Post” and “Edit”