This is a frustrating and (for our organization) useless change that appears to have no way to change the default behavior. Our users are technical users for whom a saved search should actually be a saved search by default, not a report.
There is a slightly better work-around in that you can bring back the your saved searches as a dropdown by adding the following to the navigation menu UI (from the search app go to Settings -> User interface -> Navigation menu):
<collection label="Searches">
<saved source="unclassified" />
</collection>
Then the saved searches will be listed in a drop down as they were in Splunk 5 and will also have a magnifying glass that takes you to the search and not the report. Clicking the name still takes you to the report though.
I'll be submitting feedback to Splunk - at the very least allow the default behavior to be specified by user or as part of the saved search itself.
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