Personally, I love this feature. In fact I had enabled it on my self-hosted instance when it was first possible to enable it for our Beta Testers group and most of our members like it.
The thing I would suggest doing differently is maybe make it a user preference in the future, like how the Topics link in the sidebar can be changed based on user preference. The reason is that for some neurologically divergent users the split between new and unread works better than the merged New New view. Having both available as a user preference would be much better from an accessibility standpoint. 