Ick, yes...some people who are used to "top-quoting" email defaults in clients like Lotus Notes or Outlook may like this newest-first comment sort, but I'm another one who hates it -- it breaks up the logical question/comment-and-response order. Personally I'd prefer the old order, but if you can make the sort toggleable so folks who do prefer reverse order can also sort messages the way they like, that might be best.

As for the switch to usernames/icons now linking to forum stats rather than the user's bio page -- that's also suboptimal for my usage patterns. I've mostly clicked on those wanting to see a user's bio, inventory, or wishlist because they sounded like interesting people I might want to friend, had similar tastes so I wanted to see if they had anything good to Mooch, etc.; seeing how active they are on the forums really isn't terribly useful or interesting to me. Two possible ideas -- perhaps you could simply add the forum stats to the bottom of the bio page, and link everything at once that way? Alternately, right now both the username and usericon are clickable, and take you to the same forum stats page. Perhaps instead of the redundant links, pick one of those items to link to the bio page and use the other to link to the forum stats page? (You might need to put in a default "NO USERPIC" placeholder icon for folks who don't have one of their own uploaded to make it a little more visually obvious that there's something clickable there in the photo column, of course...)

some people who are used to "top-quoting" email defaults in clients like Lotus Notes or Outlook may like this newest-first comment sort, but I'm another one who hates it -- it breaks up the logical question/comment-and-response order. Personally I'd prefer the old order

I'm changing it so that:
- in the overview, the newest comments are displayed first
- if you click on the thread comments link, that page shows you comments in oldest-first order.

Hopefully that combination (overview shows newest first, detail shows conversation order) will be seen as an improvement.

As for the switch to usernames/icons now linking to forum stats rather than the user's bio page -- that's also suboptimal for my usage patterns.

I'm still tinkering with that, I and I can see where seeing what forums someone is active on isn't all that interesting.

I like your suggestion of making the person's name/photo link to their bio, and putting a link to their forum stats from the bio. That's probably what I'll go for.