"……I’m pretty sure it’s been that way since 8.5 (maybe 8.0)"

No it's new , and i know there's an other way, luckily in maya there's always another way.
But i find it really strange that when a high end package upgrades it will develope a tool so that it requires more actions then before giving the same results as before ....

"What do you mean? What’s the difference from the front orthographic view, and the front view in perspective?"

Up until maya 8.5 , when you would click on the z, x or y in the topright manipulator thingy, the perspective view would change into an orthographic view and behaved accordingly.
Now when you press front for instance and move straight up with the camera you will see that you rotate around the object which sucks bigtime, because now i will have to press spacebar again to change views which i know will take up a lot more time .
I think Maya is slipping up here, i even think that when they keep this up they will be surpassed by free packages like blender or not so high end packages like cinema 4d
And gster if i were you i would just stick to 8.5 they haven't improved anything significantly as far as i've seen at the moment(i've been at it for a couple of ours and have only found negative changes thusfar).
Ncloth was the last good thing they introduced.
And maya 8.5 has that so no need to upgrade really.....i wish autodesk hadden't taken over alias

:headbang: