I wont do a long reply as it really comes down to a matter of personal preferences.

I'm not certain what you mean about incorrect threading, the most recent post comes at the end of the thread and you have a button to click on at the start of each thread heading to take you to the first new post, or you can select the last page of a multi-page thread, essential really as some threads in the main forum I use can reach a thousand pages in length.

I was thinking in terms of animated emoticoms rather than just the basic ones.

Reading and composing off line, well you can compose off line using something like notepad and then cut and paste into the forum, I tend to if it's a long post just in case of a lost connection, a habit carried over from using groups back in the late 80's even though I had an xstream connection from BT (64Kbs or if you won the pools you could have 2 lines and get 128Kbs :-) )