> Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out).

This is actually the first thing they've added that really bothers me. Not the feature itself (I'm sure this is incredibly useful for many people), but that there's no way to disable it for people (like you and me) that don't find it the least bit helpful.

Most people (I think) follow very many accounts (many of which are quite "noisy") and probably miss most of the tweets of those they follow - but I don't follow many accounts (and only a handful that tweet more than say a few times a day) so whenever I open Twitter (several times a day) I scroll down to where I left off and read up.