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This is a feature I am used to from Windows Explorer, but it is very helpful when navigating through directories.

When moving around between directories and navigating back, either via "up" or "back", Dolphin (and the Open File dialog) should select/highlight (and scroll to, if necessary) the last selected location. This allows you, especially when navigating by keyboard, to quickly move to another folder on the same level and enter it. Otherwise, you have to navigate all the way from the first folder to where you need to be, and this is very time consuming and can be confusing when dealing with directories containing a large number of other directories. Even when navigating with the mouse, when you deal with directories containing many directories, it reduces confusion, because you know which directory you have last visited.

I agree this would be a very useful feature, for many users. I immediately noticed this too when I used KDE/Dolphin for the first time, and beside that I find Dolphin a bit clumsy when it comes to work with files. I pretty much instantly started to look for an alternative. I'm now using Krusader and I'm happy with it so far. It has the feature you mentioned, and is also much more keyboard friendly.

Doing some testing (using Dolphin & KDE 4.14.2 on Ubuntu 14.04), I navigated to a directory with a large number of folders (/usr/share), scrolled down and clicked into one of the folders. Upon hitting back it returned to the previous directory scrolled to the same position it was when I clicked into the folder, with the folder underlined, meaning the cursor is on the folder but the folder is not selected. From there I could use the keys to navigate to other folders and use enter to open the folder and backspace to return.

If from within one of the sub-folders I hit Up, or used the navigation bar to select the upper folder, it would return to the top of the directory; but this is expected when you compare the behavior with that of a web browser where clicking a link to a previous page will take you to the top of that page rather than the position in the page where you had scrolled when you were on that page previously. From there if you hit back twice, returning to the original directory, it will still remember the original scroll position.

In short, it seems to be working as expected.

Also, for your use case of examining the contents of a series of directories, you might consider switching to making use of one of the tree views available in dolphin. You can either add the Folder panel which presents the tree of directories (not files) for navigation, or you can switch to the Details view and enable Expandable Folders in the settings for the Details view mode. When in Detail view mode with expandable folders, you can use the Right arrow key to expand the folders and the Left arrow key to contract them or move to the containing folder (much like any other tree view).

Thanks for the reply. I am not in front of my Kubuntu machine now (am at work), but I am on Kubuntu 14.10, and may be running an older version of KDE/Dolphin. I will check when I get a chance.