Yeah I was assuming box layout, in which case there’s less to render if you mute. Now I’ve seen it’s the list view the whole thing makes more sense. Definitely agree that tags is the way to go here. The watched words functionality is a great help as well.
If you definitely want to pursue categories like this, I’d recommend exploring the box layout:
You can reduce the number of featured topics to 1, but you need to do that manualy in each category
Then you get something like this:
