It's not that I want to follow specific threads. I just want to see the ones that have been most recently posted to. I don't care if I've read them before, if I've read them since the last time there was a post to them, or what subforum they're in, and the "New Posts" list used to have exactly that. I realize I can find those posts other ways, but those other ways are much less convenient. While I'm grateful that it's here, free-of-charge, for my benefit, I'm not paid to participate here and I don't feel it's too much to ask to not have to jump through extra hoops to perform a simple task. Particularly when the only justifications to have things another way are that a few people think it makes more sense in the new way, or didn't use the old way and don't see how someone could've made use of it. What time I do have to spend on the forum I prefer to spend participating, and not navigating the subforums. This is a casual discussion forum, and I don't think it could really hurt that much to have a few slightly redundant features to accommodate the preferences of different users.
At the risk of being catty, I would conjecture that this is the very same thing that's wrong with new releases of Microsoft Office. (I mention this because I deal with it just about daily at work.) It's fine to improve things, but taking features away from users or changing stuff around so much it disrupts their normal workflow is generally bad practice.
~Joe