Thanks. I wanted to make sure that there is some logic to my arguments.
I can see why that is not recommended.
In my use case, it is a small community of people working on a set of programming problems. That’s why I wanted to participate in full extent. I want to see how other folks are doing, read their code and help them once I have completed my own work. So there isn’t a lot of chatter.
I am used to old school forums where you can get RSS feed for all new topics which then you can visit and subscribe to if you want to participate further. I am also used to GNU Mailman mailing lists where you basically get everything. I am neither able to get notified of new topics nor use Discourse as mailing list. There’s no way to get notified of new topics in particular categories. I read Discourse can be used as a mailing list replacement but both my desktop client KDE KMail or web client Zoho Mail are not able to thread emails like from GNU Mailman mailing lists. I am not sure if it a problem on my side or Discourse doesn’t support email threading.
All that being said the more I use Discourse I think the best way for me would be is to visit it several times a day and find all new posts in top bar New tab. And then from there I can watch individual topics. I have also set Consider topics new when - I haven't viewed them yet and Never - automatically track topics I enter. All categories in my Discourse instance are set to Normal. So I will notified from topics I am not watching. That gives me good amount of control.
Thanks.