I still feel the buttons are much bigger than necessary, they take an unreasonable amount of space and focus at the cost of a lot of other important information on the rest of the main screen
What other important information?
It's just the forum boards table of contents!!
and the assumption that the majority of forum visitors is kind of clueless, and visits the forum just because they have serious issues that in most cases will be solved by just pushing a big update button in my opinion is not a true representation of reality.
And I didn't say that, you made the assumption there.
What is known is that a permanent link to the latest patch has been mooted for a long time as having to find and re-post the link when providing that information to other posters was time consuming.
It was one of the main driving reasons for phred putting it in his signature.
@ AvikB
The main website looks great! Nice and colourful, eyecatching and functional.
Then the forum (the latest look without the big buttons)... bluntly - boring, uninspiring and generally not nice to look at.
Especially when compared to the great work on the main MusicBee page.