The "show recent" button actually isn't much use to me if it's inside the thread. It would be much more helpful if the option was available from the topics viewlist like you said. Then I wouldn't have to load the first page and then load the last page. I could just load the last page.
As for looking nice: on most sites, you can click on the thread title to be taken to its first page, but you can also click on the thread's last post and be taken directly to the most recent page. DDO did this, for example. Would that be doable? I would think it's just a matter of adding a link to the information displayed in the Last Post column.
As always, thanks for the responsiveness. I know you have a lot of things to do. I hope you'll find some more members with the knowledge to help you out with all this. I find HTML and CSS tedious, myself.