…appropriate time for a forum mod to improve that page, perhaps, for them that use it?
That would have been another option yeah. However, as you well know mods here don’t have that sort of access. Administrator only type work and of course I can’t imagine it’d come up as a priority.
I suppose the standard option would be to provide a way to “ignore” the sub forum, but then as I mentioned, personally I’m interested in the higher scope posts - just not the nitty gritty. But sure, if there could be an ignore feature then that’d be a good step - shame to not get involved in the high level stuff any more but it’d solve the issue for me.
EDIT: Thinking about it, the only reason I started using that page was because the Mark All Read button actually works there 
Kev