I've gotten more used to the infinite scrolling, but still dislike it in its current implementation.
One thing I do a lot is grab the scroll bar with the mouse to skim through a large number of posts. I can speed read fast enough to see if there was anything I wanted to stop on to digest in full. But with infinite scrolling in its current form, the second I hit the bottom of whatever set of posts is loaded, it loads the next set and jumps the scrollbar on me... leaving me unable to continue skimming down without releasing the scrollbar and restarting.
In long topics I end up having to do this repeatedly, and it is annoying the piss out of me. I tried using the [end] key to get it to load the thread so I can use the scrollbar as god (or whoever invented it) intended, but then Discourse unloads the posts from the top and screws me over going back up.
Of course, if there were pages, I would have to scroll+skim and then have to release to hit a page button... but I usually set forums to whatever the max limit is on posts to load, so it's basically "infinite scroll" already unless there are over 250 posts or something. I like the idea of infinite scroll. I just can't stand how the Discourse implementation breaks the real scrollbar in its current implementation.
Surely there has to be some way to have our cake and eat it too? (have our infinite scroll and have a working scrollbar?) Maybe if you loaded all of the posts/content but didn't attach the ember.js crap to every post until they come into view, or get close to view?