Thanks Eric,
I think (but my mind goes fuzzy trying to remember things I don't use) that the "New Posts" have always been there even back to the Trunked Radio Net days. With that in mind, there are lots of ways to accomplish the same task here and every person has their own way of getting to what they want. Making any particular way more obvious would, of course, cause those who use some other method to want "their" way to get the same treatment.
For what it is worth, I am one of those who first, go through all the emails that I have gotten as a result of individual thread subscriptions to see the most recent replies (since my last visit). Then I (again using emails) look at the forums I am subscribed to and see the new posts in those forums (this notification comes out in the early morning hours). Finally I just go to the various forum indexes to see what forums have new (unread) topics and see if any of them might be of interest to me personally or in moderator role. Of course everyone does their forum surfing differently so ... My point being my way works for me, others look at "new posts" across the whole board, others just randomly check things out, I would imagine that there are at least one or two people who have a set "search" that they perform looking for certain terms and only look at posts since the last time they were on. Find out what works for you, but don't be afraid to look around and see what else might be available here.
