I'm sorry to hear that these alternatives do not meet your needs. However, I will re-iterate that the feature was originally broken due to the nature of blocks and their native caching which would not show the user the correct read status. Removing the read status to make it agnostic is the change which was done some time ago. On small boards, it could be this was never found due to caching times and infrequent users but on a whole from all sized communities, self-hosted to our Cloud, we heard significant complaints about the read status not being correct. I'm afraid, it's a damned if we do and damned if don't scenario by all involved as the bug would require significant rewrites of the block core code to fully resolve so this was the solution to appease all involved. Once again, I am sorry this does not meet your needs and I hope in the future you can find something that fits them.
This was never mentioned at all. What I mentioned was I can see the downfall of the Activity Stream in your use if you are looking for something which would embed in other pages. If there is confusion, please ask as we do not want to mislead other clients.
Once again, I assure you that all feedback is considered. Unfortunately, we cannot appease everyone all the time. However, all ideas and suggestions are thoroughly reviewed and vetted by our team.