1. Scroll bar for the chat area is coming, as a short-term fix. There are big layout changes coming that will address this more gracefully. Making the text chat area moveable and resizeable is part of that.
2. We're rolling out a few bug fixes later this week which might help, and a bunch more logging to help us improve our ability to handle laggy connections.
3. Josh nailed this. Was that your situation?
4. I like this, too.
5. Once we can detect laggy connections, we can force people into this mode.
6. Layering is definitely buggy. Your observation about rejoining is interesting, and gives me some ideas. Grids, and a dedicated map/background layer, are coming soon, which will help.
7. I feel your pain. We're working hard to handle the network issues more gracefully.
Excellent feedback! Thank you so much for taking the time to get it all down, it is extremely helpful.