A plugin wouldn’t be necessary, a theme component would do. We still store the new topic + new reply (AKA unread) counts in the topic tracking state for the user:
This is how we are able to still show separate counts on the subtabs here:
I do agree with your priority logic, I also think that unread are more important than new. The problem has always been explaining this distinction to people who are new to Discourse who don’t understand the tracking logic as well.
Will discuss internally, but maybe there is room for some preference like this? Though it does take up a bunch of space…
