I appreciate you replying 
The too many rooms options makes sense to me IF people only navigate a forum through the categories page. When I come here to Meta, I rarely use the categories page. If the topics filter option were better on the main topics page, I would even more rarely go to individual category pages.
The benefit I see of the all-topics feed here on Discourse is that people don’t have to navigate the forum through a Yahoo-like directory approach, but can have both Yahoo and Google (and dare I say Facebook Newsfeed) approach to navigating.
But mayb the mere appearance of many categories overwhelms people? Or maybe we’re just curious creatures and want to click on all those category buttons on the left?
I’m not sure yet what to do, just glad to have a space to reflect and dialogue publicly on it.