I’m not sure why that’s not working for you, but an alternative is to make sure this is set in your settings and then scroll to the bottom of a pinned thread:
Indeed, and that’s what shows in New, where pinned posts aren’t listed once viewed or dismissed:
https://forum.smallgiantgames.com/new
You can also see what’s most recently had posts in Latest:
https://forum.smallgiantgames.com/latest
If you consider the “main page” to be the Categories list instead of New, Latest, Unread, or Top, that could well be true. I don’t ever look at that page, personally.
It’s unfortunately impractical to deal with the volume of merged that happen when major topics aren’t pinned, and I don’t have control over the Discourse settings for how the Category list you seem to be looking at is displayed.
But the other views don’t put pinned posts on top, so there’s plenty of ways to see a list of new or recently updated topics.
There are several new posts from during the time these other ones have been pinned that have received a large volume of views and replies, so I don’t really accept the premise that people are incapable of noting there are other threads in existence.
Your new thread has 40 views from the last 38 minutes, which seems like a reasonable start.