I want to work a bit more on the root cause before fighting in the (*) change. Lots of code expects the counts to be numbers so it is a rather extensive change to get in.
We should not be allowing people to treat a topic that is 12 months old as “new”, we need some saner caps. This would actually solve the issue for you at least here.
On sites like http://www.helloforos.com/ where they are churning 200 new topics a day we need a way to wind down the caps to and set them globally so, new === 24 hours or less old for everyone (with no user options)
I would like to first address some of the root issues before coming back to the UI here