Thanks for the feedback. We always had this feature but we just didn't default to show the avatar because we not sure if everybody likes avatars. So, we leave the option to the user, if the user clicks the little
icon, then they see avatars.
We only started to default showing the avatar for the "last post" column recently. I am glad you like it. We can also default to show the avatar of the thread starter. Do you think that will be better?