Appreciate the suggestions! Going over the screens from top to bottom:
1. I'll try it. I was already planning on restoring the old likes bar layout and I'll also see what can be done about other stuff to get as close to the old layout as possible. No promises though. Working with these elements often proves to be troublesome considering multiple resolutions and resizing. But seems doable!
2/3. I can try to work around it by inserting some long blank element to avoid loading more, just like with comments scrolling option.
4. I wouldn't hope for much here. All the pages got infinite scrolling so the footer would have to be always fixed to the bottom of the page which would interfere with comments or videos below it and also there is no way (I guess) to get to the old layout to compare what each footer button did in order to replicate it properly. BUT maybe I could add language and country settings to the sidebar on the main page.

I got some stuff to fix first before I get to it so don't expect it to happen overnight, thanks!