It's been noted already (there are other threads on this) and is being fixed so that turning off answers will work and the threads go to their right place. But if you don't turn them off in your profile then you get only the answer not the answer and then the post repeated in the thread.
I think that compatibility requires that any time when there appears some feature alternative to already
existent,
the old one must be set as default in users settings. At least for already registered users.
Whereas the new ones can be forced to get accustomed to the new design :).
Because for those accustomed to the old behavior it often requires non-trivial efforts to apply just to
discover the way of restoring the old behavior. In this concrete case my way was the following one.
I
suggested that there should be many people dissatisfied with the new design. Just because in many cases
the answers are
context dependent, i.e. their true meaning depends on posts placed
before them;
besides, the meaning of many posts that are not marked as "answers" depends on the "answer" posts
placed in their original chronological place.
Accidentally I knew of the existence of the current forum (whereas most of users do not suspect, that such thing exists).
I came here and saw, that one of the first threads in this forum is (naturally :() devoted to the subj.
Then I saw the quoted post and understood that there exists a way to return good old behavior.
I came to my "profile" and saw that
there is no way at all to change something in my personalized user interface :((
After about half an hour of search I've discovered the "My settings" link. Which I had not even noticed before,
just because I was quite satisfied with the old default settings. I pressed the link and saw the checked box
"Always show answers first on thread page". The label is ambiguous, because in both versions of interface
the duplicates of answers are being shown first. What changed, is that now the answers just disappeared
from their natural positions. Nevertheless I unchecked the box. Then, at last, I became happy :)
To conclude with, the new feature is, imo, not only useless, but even harmful. Because, as I said,
displacing answeres from their original contexts often makes the whole thread (or big parts of it) unintelligible.
A useful feature would be (again imo) the eventual possibility to
not duplicate answers at the begin of the thread.
