It is also the only place where a topic has a specific intended recipient.
I tend to be more visual than I realized until recently (Apr 1 spinning clown avatars) so seeing custom “to” avatars would probably be the quickest recognition cue for me, when they’re custom - I think membername could work and having that information there would be a big improvement
Currently the layout is
message title - message creator (in this case, self) - number of replies - age of last post
I think treating the intended message recipient as a kind of category in terms of layout could work
Maybe
membername - message title - message creator (in this case, self) - number of replies - age of last post
or
message title - membername - message creator (in this case, self) - number of replies - age of last post