Thanks for the reply. I think I covered some of those points in my post, but thanks for clarifying.

I get the justification for removing the tabs. I admitted in my post that the justification for the removal was fair enough. I, along with the other people commenting in the meta post, just don't like that the behaviour is also unavailable manually with e.g. ?tab=(active|hot|week|month).

As for having to login once but join every site, it's just a pain I was unwilling to go through for the behaviour I wanted. As I admitted, this is my loss and not any loss to stackexchange.