Hi Jake, thanks for all the love.
We're constantly working on making your feed better, so you have the best of content that you're interested in.
As far as infinite scroll is concerned, we had a discussion on this, and decided to go this way as it made more sense in terms of usability, with as much less cognitive stress on your part, as is possible. Currently, we maintain your scroll position when you interact with an item in your feed, and come back to your feed view.
Thank you for putting your pain points here, for all the above UX references, and for running this poll. We have a feature requests page, where you can add your request.
We will definitely look into this, and will get back to you with what we come up with.