And they’ve removed the “formatting guide” from the messages section. Although I know how to use Textile, clients don’t. And wading through unformatted client messages can be a p.i.a. (not that they’d bother to use it, anyway…)

There’s no permalinks next to individual comments, so I can only refer to a thread and say “third comment down” rather than linking directly to them. The permalinks exist (the dashboard screen and email notification uses them), but they can’t be seen on the page anywhere, so can’t be used by users, just by the system.

There’s more, but I can’t think of them at the moment. Nothing which I think would make the apps ‘bloaty’

I’ve been using Backpack ever since it was launched, and Basecamp and Highrise more recently and I have very few complaints. The major issue I have is that I’m consistently finding that they don’t do something I would find very useful, but I know they’ve deliberately kept them simple. Those extras I want are unlikely to be the extras you want, and if they were to add both they’d quickly end up with excessive bloat.

I definitely prefer the cut-down approach. And if I ever find something I do need I know I can use the APIs to build an add-on myself.