Definitely not. Like you said, as someone who uses a not-so-speedy internet connection (or 3G/on-the-go connections), tapping the menu button to access the other boards is the faster option, regardless of how many taps it takes in comparison. Plus, of course, you're talking about doing that when browsing the board/forum, but do you go back twice when in-thread versus the menu options?
It's probably more that my GAF browsing flowchart with the new forum sections is currently:
- Go to webapp
- Choose OT
- Browse OT threads (if any peak interest)
- Repeat until all OT threads of interest have been replied to or read
- Jump into Forum Section listing
- Decide if I feel like checking in on OT community or Gaming community sections
- Browse that section (if any peak interest)
- Repeat until all section threads of interest have been replied to or read
- Jump into Forum Section listing
- Choose the other sub-forum that I didn't pick the first time
- Browse that section until completion
- Jump into Forum Section listing
- Choose OT
- Repeat repeat repeat
...basically exhausting all the threads in a given section before moving on to the others. Because of this pattern, I always want to go back from inside a thread to the main thread listing section to see what changes have been made (has anyone replied to any of my posts, has a new thread been created, has an older thread been bumped that I want to read) and only if there is nothing new that I want to dig into do I want to go back to the forum listings. Basically I always will be jumping to the forum selection screen from the thread listing page...so for me it's always an equivalent number of taps to get into a new section (whether I pick the menu option or the GAF bubble)