While I think I've been able to move the primary role of the "Manually sort folders" add-on for Thunderbird into the core (it will take some more time before it's released), there's still one thing left.
That is to select specific folders at startup.
I considered creating a new add-on to do this. However, this seems to be impossible with the WebExtension API. So what should we do? Make a monkey patch it, or work on extending the API? I think it would be much easier to implement it in the core than to do that.
I have already suggested this in the Thunderbird Developers chat, but I want to mention it here as well.
I think it would be easy to implement a mechanism to have a user-specified folder selected at startup. As for the UI for selecting the startup folder, we need to think a bit. Would it be better to specify it in the folder's context menu? How do we unassign it?