No, that would not help me. I still want to know what the new topics are, they are just not nearly as important as the unread topics.
Again, not really. This still takes away choice. Sometimes I want to go to new first, other times unread first. It just depends on how much time I have in that moment or if I’m looking for something in particular.
Personally, I thought the old way worked perfectly and was very intuitive. I’m actually surprised to hear that so many people found it confusing.
It seems to me like this change was a lot broader than necessary given the stated issue. If there was confusion by the term “unread”, surely another word could have been found that wasn’t already in use, like “updated” or “following”.
To add a little more than just my personal preference, I primarily participate in two Discourse communities. In both places I brought up this change and that it could be reverted by an admin setting in order to solicit opinions. In both cases, every single person who replied wanted the change reverted. That’s not to say no one liked the new approach or that people wouldn’t have gotten used to it, but at the very least no one interested in the new version spoke up. And to be clear, this was maybe a dozen people per community, so not a huge sample size, but not just a few people either. In both cases, the admins did revert the change and everyone has been happy with that.