I entertain many ideas, but I am not enthused in making changes that would cause more harm than good. Optimising for off topic topics is less on our roadmap.
Anyway, the good news is that we have some plans to improve your particular use case.
On our roadmap for quite a while we have had improving the timeline control. It would be nice if you could visually see all replies, mentions, bookmarks, stuff you liked and so on.
One interesting experiment I am kind of open to would be a “collapse thread to stuff I care about a lot”. You would hit that shortcut and it would collapse out all posts that we do not think are “important”. It could show “mentions, replies, quotes, posts you made, posts you liked, bookmarks”. I could see such a filter very interesting on reasonably large topics, especially for a “quick catch up”.