streetdk Didn't think a box with an option to enable or disable views would make things so much more complicated, or in their words, "no longer keeping it clean and simple."
And how would the views be displayed? We've already got one column of numbers to the right of the discussion list, to tell us us the number of posts in each discussion. Adding the views sounds like a second column of numbers, so you'd also need an icon or column heading to tell users what each column means.
Now ... consider all the other things that could be added. A third column to indicate the number of unread posts in the discussion (because currently the number of unread posts replaces the total post count, which some people might find inconvenient)? An icon to indicate which threads are trending? Another number to let us know how many users are participating ... or perhaps even the avatars of participants, like they have in Discourse?
If we put our minds to it, we can probably come up with a pretty long list of things that could be added ... and each one of those things, taken individually, wouldn't make the interface that much less "clean and simple". But if we try to put them all in, it'll get cluttered fast. So ... which ones do we omit? Where does the line get drawn?
Everyone's going to have a different opinion about that. So I think, rather than make arbitrary decisions, Toby has chosen to keep the basic design as minimal as possible ... and to make Flarum easily extensible, so admins can pick and choose the added functionality they want their sites to have.
