i really don't understand all the fuss about friends. It's just a new buddy system. And if you don't wanna use it, you don't use it. Done.
And as for 90% of the posts here in this thread - i'm not impressed when all i hear is just "oh that sucks - spawn of hell". Without an explanation i'm not gonna even consider changing anything.
The social groups stuff is all disabled. Visitor page messaging has been disabled (apart from your own page) - picture albums have been disabled - almost all new features of vB3.7 have been disabled. My god, I think if I left some of those on, half of the posters here would've been in the ICU by now because of all the heart attacks / popped blood vessels.