I love the direction this is headed. Very clean. At the risk of appearing more “social” - Have you considered adding optional topic excerpts and/or image thumbnails? A nice responsive design that takes advantage of screen width …
- tuck reply count under the title
- push the avatars all the way right to eliminate the ragged right hand border
- right justify the last poster and time immediately to the left of the avatar to open space in the middle
- put the topic excerpt in the middle space only when the screen is “wide enough”
- truncate the title as needed
