Good points, thanks for bringing them up.

On second thought, I think I may have overestimated the value of things like study partners and project collaboration. Personally, I just really value being able to do these things with other LW users. Inferential distance is one big reason. I sense that I'm not alone here, but I'm not sure.

In addition to these sorts of tangential things, I also would like to see the quality of posts and conversation on LW improve, and I think some of the other points I brought up would help address that.

The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?

Hmm, I don't want to nitpick, but I'm struggling to answer this question because I don't know how to interpret words like "bottleneck" and "satisfied". I think that a more sophisticated UI could really transform how people think and communicate. As for how things are right now, I'd qualitatively describe it as "fine". Maybe "mildly satisfying".