Quotes are one of the weaknesses of the new version. I know the developers of Vanilla have been given feedback that this "embedding the complete post as a quote" was a poor idea. I think they did go a bit overboard with their embedding system here. Becuse it is an embed of the actual post, editing it isn't possible.

What I usually do is just to copy the text to quote to the clipboard, then just select the Quote format in the editor and paste it in. I usually start the first line by typing @username wrote, as that will automatically link to the user (Will also notify the user that a mention was made). This doesn't embed things like time and stuff, but it is usually sufficient for my purposes, as I just use quotes to put things into the right context, not prove anything.

If you use the Wysiwyg editor instead of the Rich editor, it also handles quotes differently.

That's the point. I don't need to make them stickies. They won't clog up the all discussions page, but they are still super-easy to find by visiting the category directly, since it will be focused with a rather short list of posts.

Vanilla does have two kinds of stickies though, category stickies, and all discussion stickies, so I can sticky something inside a category without making iy a "global" sticky. But that is hardly needed as long as the contents of those categories are rather limited

Those are not directly editable, you have to use commands like :CC2ROTATE: on the entity.

I think the years have passed quicker than you remember Jim. CC3 was released 14 years ago. Web pages are still a bit older than that.

That's basically what the 'Resources' and 'Forum Rules & Guides' categories are for. They're intended to house all the permanent stuff I want to be easily accessible to the forum members..