I don't think that hysterical overreaction does anything to further your viewpoints.
What are you referring to? My interpretation of a previous post about when the email system does or does not send me further posts in a thread?
I think there are a couple of flaws in your desired approach:
1) It presupposes the volume of forum traffic will always be low. The support forums have more than doubled their traffic just in the last month, and traffic is continuing to climb at an increasing rate. (This is mostly due to finally figuring out how to get Google to index the forums.) At what point do you really not want to read every message? 50 a day? 500 a day?
There is often a major difference between the subject/heading of a post and its content. Ignoring content because heading does not interest me is shooting myself in the foot. If posts are easy to read, I can skim them quickly to know whether or not I want to mark to be saved, or want to answer or ignore it. I see all of the current post at the top of the screen. In a browser I need to scroll through all previous posts of a thread to get to the new one(s), but I still must remember what I've read before, the new POSTS are not marked.
2) There's a blind assumption that because you read forum traffic via email for the last 10 years, that it is the only way you can possibly do it. I used to use the email notification, but I've abandoned that with the new forum software as it's much easier to keep the forums in a browser tab than to constantly switch back and forth between Outlook and the browser. It's pretty much impossible to follow a thread via email (even if you did get every message), because they tend to come in hours or days (sometimes weeks) apart. I find Alerts far more useful to keep track of new messages than emails.
"Newer" is not always (actually RARELY) BETTER. For example, I have less than 10% of the screen / window available to type my answer, I cannot see anything but the last 5 lines of what I am quoting or writing. In email I have almost the whole screen available. Remember the old days when "structured coding" required no more than 50 lines per module? Now I have 4 lines at a time! I would be better off using wordpad to write my message, and paste it here...
Just because YOU like browser more does not mean EVERYONE does! Remember what Microsoft does not - what the P in PC stands for! It is PERSONAL computer - so I can do thing they way I like to.
As for following threads, IMHO all you need is reasonable quotations - if the poster in not superverbose, and quotes just what is being responded to, whether the quotation is minutes or years old, anyone reading my post would know what I am agreeing or disagreeing with. In this forum quoting parts is difficult, you cannot mark it as in some previous incarnations. Also, no spell-checking... BTW, I very rarely displayed email by thread - always depended on my memory to sort them out. This forum does not handle subthreads, so if I respond to a post that is not the last it still puts it at the end. Can you change the "message time" reporting from "5 min ago" to TOD? Since I spent way more than 5min on replying, that display is plain WRONG!