Yes, agreed, the problem is that quite often one reply is not equivalent to a case solved, some back&forth may happen and then these message threads are “in the way” of the messages that are waiting for a first reply. Some of our queues have heavy traffic and are handled by several people, and any small improvement to keep things sorted out does help.
Yes, we do, and this helps handling what has been assigned tagged and/or assigned. However, the target of this feature requests is to keep surfacing precisely the messages that haven’t been tagged or assigned yet.
An alternative option would be to tag automatically all incoming messages with e.g. unanswered, and then have people watching that tag alone. However, this option should have to be implemented as well, and it wouldn’t be perfect. I would create extra manual work and is prone to human mistakes, unless the tag can be automatically removed when a message is assigned or replied.
We believe that the sorting we are proposing here makes sense for a ticketing system where the priority is to handle incoming requests fast and not let any request fall between the cracks. If there are concerns about integrating this request in core, we would be interested in its implementation as a plugin.