Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. The HTML help has all those features that you say the new help doesn't support. So I gave up forward-backward navigation to have a single instance; I didn't use that often anyway. But I still have the index always showing, a keyword box that takes me directly to a topic in the index, a splitter that remembers its position, Ctrl-F search in the document window.
Oh yeah, it also doesn't remember the number of results per page in the search pane.