Yeah, this is a nomenclature issue. @sam gave the example earlier of a bug on a forum. I won’t pretend to know how most Discourse instances are used, but … a support forum seems like a limited scope. I don’t understand the ‘Unread Hoarding’ line. Jonathan’s analogy is perfect: it’s the modern inbox experience. Just because it’s “read” doesn’t mean it goes away. In fact, if I clicked on “Everything” in my email box, particularly Gmail, I’d expect to see … literally everything (or ‘Latest’). That isn’t the case.
The solution here seems to be providing Admin control, with the user the option to manipulate. Not sure why it needs to be more complicated, or ‘Static’; in fact, given feedback I’ve collected on my forum, without these tweaks it would sadly render this unusable. Which would suck, because this is such an awesome and much needed addition!