Oh wow. That is a big problem for us. This explains it well.
As for user configurability,
That’s a different issue allt ogether. Users could always navigate to the suppressed category to view it all. Now we can’t have this. This issue is how the latest page displays, not notifications/watching. I do NOT want the category to be muted by default, because that would overly suppress replies. I just want them not to be visible on the latest page.