Ade,
It is not surprising, but I have never heard of the lathe you are about to receive, so I wouldn't know about spindle bores etc, or whether the lathe has reverse or not.
What you have to think about is that a threaded nose has been with us almost since the beginning of engineering lathe time, and has stood the test of time rather well.
My previous lathe was an Atlas, which had the same nose thread as a Boxford, and that stood me in good stead for many years, and it had a normal 3MT up the spout. The only time I needed to run in reverse was when screwcutting metric threads, and so it never had any speed on it, as I was using the back gears.
On the other hand, I am now using D1-4, and it is a true pleasure to use, less than a minute to change a chuck, and you can go from full wack fwds to full back without having to worry about the chuck coming loose. Also they remount very accurately if you have taken the trouble to mark up your chucks on the optimum location, plus of course, even on a smallish lathe like mine, it has a very useful large spindle bore size.
I am sure if you could wake Bob up from his hibernation, he could give you all the details you need to know.
Bogs