Apparently, development made bad decisions around this functionality, and it went out the door. Now, it's probably a heavy lift to revert the code, or recode it, as there may have been significant structural code alterations. To save face, they have been silent about it... no one will want to accept blame for this blunder. Again, I have to believe that MS is well aware of the negative sentiment around this. It is very easy to measure sentiment. It's been quite a while since the OP date of this thread. They haven't said anything, no comment, no advise how to accomplish what people are asking for, or promise of improvement.
The only other explanation is that this thread or the other forum links to this topic is not visible enough to MS and they may ignorantly think all is well. As is evidenced here, even the most average user realizes this as a shortcoming.... so again, even if MS is not monitoring these threads, they have to realize the shortcoming.
Best of luck to us. It's an angry day at work when IT forces switching to the New Teams with no option to switch back.