I find that I use "Read new messages since my last visit" from the home page instead of going to "Recent Topics" because recent topics no longer has all topics in it.
"Recent topics" shows only the most recent 30 threads. So I want to keep it to quilting as much as possible. Otherwise, non-quilting discussions would push out the mainstream topics.
"Read new messages since..." shows all of them without a limit. If 150 threads were modified since your last visit, you'll see a list of 150 threads.
Filtering in one but not in the other seems like a good compromise.