[name_m]Hi[/name_m] @Tee_Time,
Sorry to hear you’re not finding it user-friendly! It does take a little time to get used to the change, for sure, but I think the new platform certainly has its merits.
I’ll answer your questions one by one:
1. Customisation
This is something we’re looking at adding back in, but we keep being waylaid by small technical issues and the like. But we definitely want to bring more Nameberry colours and personalisation back in soon, so please bear with us on that one.
2. Pages
Pagination is not an option with Discourse. But you have several options for skipping to any point in a thread.
On desktop, you should see this scrollbar to the right of each topic. You can navigate quickly and easily anywhere in the topic by clicking and dragging the little blue button in the middle. The black text next to it (153/342) will change to tell you which post number you’re at at any given moment.
To skip back to the first post, just click the first post date at the top of that scrollbar (in the above example, that’s “Apr 27”). To skip to the end, click the latest post time at the bottom (in the example, that’s “1hr ago”).
You can also see in the example above that there’s a blue box with “Back” in it. That’s my last read post point. If I click that, it will take me back to the last post I read within that topic.
On mobile, this blue box bottom-right is what you’re looking for:
The “11/17” refers to the post number I’m currently on, and if I tap the box, it brings up the same toolbar that I’ve explained above.
You can also “Summarize” very long topics, which automatically condenses them down to the most important posts (up to a max of 100). More on that below 
Emojis in User Cards
I have no idea why this isn’t working for you. I have just tried it myself in case there’s been a glitch, but it’s working as expected for me.
Are you able to add emojis, bold and italics to normal posts?