This is really good. Following on from @mcwumbly’s comment (also very insightful, I realized while reading it that putting avatars on the left in the topic list gives a “talk bubble” effect to the title that I had not considered… also symmetric with posts too) I think you could suppress the header as well!
Hopefully we can ship one or more of these topic list layouts as choices out of the box at some later date… part of the mythical setup wizard.