Also, get rid of the patronizing message that encourages my users to put in tickets for a feature that won't work for them in the first place. I disabled it for a list of reasons, I don't have time to explain that to hundreds of well-meaning curious people.  

Can confirm this was reverted (at least as of 10/16 when my instance went to the new home UI.) I had a ticket in my backlog to fix all of them, and found them working just fine when I went to make updates. 

In my instance, when logged in as any user with a Request license type, I am able to freely interact with the Priorities feature despite it being globally disabled in in my Setup area. I am also seemingly able to successfully add both tasks and issues to any project that test user can see, despite t...

Even though it's disabled in the waffle menu, I can still freely interact with it as this test user with a 'Request' license applied. 

Also adding, not only will they see the option even if it is disabled, the 'Request' license type completely ignores the setting entirely. Anyone in my instance with Request license type is able to interact with the Priorities feature freely even though it is disabled in Setup. Including being able ...

That's what I read too. Right below that there's now a note saying that users on the fast release schedule will receive the release one day early. That's not mentioned anywhere in the early release documentation, or in any other release announcements though. 

Did I miss an announcement that Adobe had changed the Q4 release to the 16th instead of the 17th? The new Home UI and Priorities were suddenly both live in our Production environments this morning, and the old worklist URL now will only redirect to the workspaces one. 

The use-case/behavior you're describing is the primary function of a journal-entry report. Here is an example of one of my test cases. I updated the same custom field on that request 3 times. As long as you have track changes turned on for the field in question, you should have data like this availa...

Well that throws a wrench in my plan! I had seen demos where it was selectable from the waffle menu and I guess I assumed feature-parity to be able to turn it on/off for individual layout templates. (Which in my instance generally correspond to our groups.)  You are correct, that is not supported, a...

I'm planning a bit of both. I've got a few smaller groups of highly technical folks that always want the new toys. They'll give great feedback, so they'll get to keep it. Everyone else will get it hidden until I've had a chance to learn it better and get documentation ready myself.