I had some users complain that it wasn’t obvious how to post a new topic, so I styled the button to look like .btn-primary. I think that might be a good default, actually:
This is intentional, we believe people should look for existing topics first before rushing to create a new one. Reply is primary action not create topic.
Ah, interesting! For our community, we currently want new users to be able to find how to ask questions more easily. We’re a small, private community. But I can see why this would be counterproductive in large, public, and active forums.
Yes it’s totally fine to change this to whatever you want locally on your discussions, my comments are in the context of global defaults for all sites.