I actually love that drafts are brought to the top; it keeps things from getting lost for me. I even sometimes will write one character as a reminder I need to finish. But still, I understand your frustration.
That being said, search makes it really easy to solve this. I rarely do anything other than Cmd+K/Ctrl+K, and type a character or two. For me, it's become second nature, and I never find myself searching around for where to go. For me, the left sidebar is more of a status report, while Cmd+K is how I navigate.
The thing with floating to the top is that it doesn't have to be an either/or proposal. Bring a copy of the channel to the top but also leave it in the list.
The infuriating thing is that these would be some of the easiest possible features to add a toggle for. There's nothing wrong with liking drafts that float to the top, or rich text editing, but when a significant portion of your users is extremely upset about a tiny UX behavior like this, even if they end up being a minority, there's no excuse to not add an opt-out.
The real problem is that companies seem to think that users hate toggles. It's extremely hard for me to understand how valid this might be since I have techy people around me most often, but even when I don't, I've never heard someone complain about excess toggles. Ever. Is this a thing people do? I hear orders of magnitude more complaints about lack of toggles.
I don't have any justification for this, but my gut feeling is that this trend was started by Chrome. They (compared to, say, Firefox) offer the bare minimum of settings, and even the feature flags they do offer are deprecated and removed in a couple versions at most. It just reeks of a paternalistic "we know what you want better than you do" attitude to have about your user-base.
You can tell that this is the Chrome team's philosophy when you go onto their bug tracker and see the vast ocean of WONTFIXes. You might even extend the philosophy to all of Google, when I think of things like "ignoring" "even" "words" "in" "quotes" come to think of it...
I'd say one problem is that toggles make your code more complicated and harder to test. And the more toggles there are the more combinations for potential issues to pop up.
As a user I'd prefer to see more toggles, but if I had to maintain a product I'd probably try to make good decisions instead of leaving things open.
I hear this time and time again and it is the biggest fucking cop-out. We write code for all stakeholders, not just for us. A product manager's (or worse, a focus group's) "good decisions" are more-often-than-not lowest-common-denominator drivel that has lead us to the current reality of terrible software -- it's like a tragedy of the commons where everyone acting in their own rational self-interest ends up overfishing the lake and then suddenly the town is facing starvation.
Boo-fucking-hoo, write the extra test case.
I'd be less bitter if I didn't feel this sentiment was almost single-handedly responsible for the death of "options for power users"
It's not "the extra test case." It's literal exponential growth in the number of test cases as you add more and more toggles.
It can still be justified to add configuration options, but you can't safely test one feature in isolation and assume that it will never interact with any others.
We don't necessarily need every case to be testable, and even so thoughtful use of occams razor or something can prevent the kind of exponential worst-case scenarios that almost nobody wants.
My problem is that contemporary software design seems to draw that line at a place that allows for few use-cases. It seems to be especially prevalent in modern enterprise stuff like Slack or Skype -- with the latter being a very good example of the old ways (e.g. original skype clients) regressing into the new ways (e.g. latest skype version).
If you practice the minimum of separation of concerns then it won't be O(m*n) just O(m+n). Do you really need to test email notifications twice just because the channels no longer jump around in the channel list?
Then bury them so deep they will never see it. There's already a Preferences // Advanced tab. Do whatever you need to appease the wide population. It appears only in desktop app or browser even though it's under advanced? Deal! I will still be happy. Is it a CLI option? Fine. I have been using Unix-ish command lines since 1993. I can deal with an option or two. Yeah that wouldn't work on mobile but the primary audience here is not mobile -- and I could see that toggle saved and applied across platforms as well. Make it a slash command. If need to be, I will hexedit the living shit out of your Electron app, I have first written assembly code in 1987 and while it's been a very, very long time since I've done so, I am on good terms with hex editors still. Whatever. Just give us the options, 'mkay?
Most of the time toggles are done poorly in that I can’t tell if they are on or off. There’s no consensus on if that is left or right. Or lit up or darkened. It is maddening.
In my opinion the right way to do toggles is to have area below it that is either enabled / expanded for On or grayed out / collapsed for Off. That way I can also read what the toggle implies. I suppose that can be done in mouse over if there are space constraints.
That being said, search makes it really easy to solve this. I rarely do anything other than Cmd+K/Ctrl+K, and type a character or two. For me, it's become second nature, and I never find myself searching around for where to go. For me, the left sidebar is more of a status report, while Cmd+K is how I navigate.