This is kind of irritating. I'm immediately put on the “Latest” part of the forums page. I'm old school. I want to see the forum list by default as with older style forums. I've gone through the settings and cannot find a way to fix this. Am I out of luck?

There isn't a setting for this, but I can look at it. The latest activity for the forums has by far been the preferred view for most users since ~2008/2009, so a setting for this wasn't considered.