Californ1a
That works for the tutorial path books, but there's currently no way to disable automatically marking the next quest in a series as your active task when you finish the previous quest (if you have no active path). If you have an active path, then by all means it should definitely mark the next one, but I think if the path is empty then it shouldn't mark the next quest in the series without asking.
I think a better way to handle the "next quest" marker would be to add a button on quest complete windows (or a new interface after quest complete) to ask if you want to mark the next quest (ex. if you finish Marlin's Crystal, give a popup saying "Do you want to set a quest marker for Holy Grail?").
Also a bit of a side-note, tutorial island right now automatically opens interface windows for you, so you never actually learn what buttons on the ribbon do what because you never interact with the ribbon bar at all. The steps in the tutorial island path are there for things like "open your spell book" but it just skips them and opens the window on its own.
In response to player feedback, last week I submitted a bug fix to QA to support disabling automatically selecting achievements in a path, and applied that behaviour specifically to the quest series paths.
Confirmation prompts are also an option, but as you noted we need to strike the right balance between short-form objectives (having to confirm every step in the tutorial paths wouldn't be good) and long-form objectives (you might but might not want to continue with the next quest in a series), so sounds like something we can build upon.
Would appreciate your feedback when that patch note goes live. :)
Regarding forcing toplevel panels open on Tutorial Island instead of highlighting buttons and making you click them... It's been a perpetual area of aggravation for us.
Unfortunately, the RS3 toplevel UI sacrificed readability for customisation. You can freely close, resize, dock your windows, at the expense that it's all stored client-side.
That means our server-side guidance systems have no way of knowing whether you have a particular button on your ribbon, or on your screen, which makes tutorialising them quite difficult.
The closest we've been able to get is to tell the toplevel to force open a toplevel interface, but because the communication is one-way, then have no way of finding out if it did or get information about the theoretical button that's capable of opening it.
Add that there's an entirely different flow to those interfaces (and in some cases they don't even exist at all) on legacy and mobile, and it becomes quite a sticky problem.