These are the two things (among other things) I just can't get used to, so I've added more options to our instances.
I would bombard the Mastodon core folks with pull requests (in layman's terms: fixes or changes), but one of my suggestions received this response: "As described in CONTRIBUTING.md, we have internal design processes and generally do not accept external contributions without prior discussion on the design." Since then, I've been hesitant and have only sent small ones their way.
The rest stay in our mastodon instance only, like this one.
- Open hashtags directly (I never use those options when trying to get to the hashtag)
- Show notifications in the main menu (I constantly check for notifications in the menu instead of at the bottom)
You can find these in Settings → Appearance
https://mementomori.social/settings/preferences/appearance
