JMRD

My problems:
One album with 100 images blows up the Activity Stream.  You get a flood of images, even though it's a single album.* Clicking IP.Gallery image in AS opens up lightbox, even though underlying premise of AS was content discovery and not content interaction.  Shouldn't it open in the IP.Gallery application? A thought regarding Images in an Album: this is the same corollary as many Posts in a Topic, and the concern of the OP.  Users may not want to be notified of each individual content item, but of the content container (eg. Album or Topic) which is far more visually efficient when there are multiple related content items in the same content container.     

@Lindy since you asked, I would like to know how I can get a list of topics with new (unread posts). When I come to visit the board, I want to know which topics have new replies since my last visit. I don't care for individual posts and I don't understand why I should even see each specific post that has been made. Busy boards can have 1.000+ new posts each day. Do you really expect a visitor that comes back to the board 24 hours later to go through an endless stream of individual posts to see what is new?
What would you suggest to that user to stop complaining about the loss of overview he had with VNC?

I've read a lot of topics criticising the activity stream feature and I find it utterly unuserfriendly as well. What was the logic behind this change? It seems like a case where someone was trying to fix something that already worked and made it worse. Like Microsoft and the whole Windows 8 debacle.
Activity stream may be useful for a low traffic board and works on Facebook where you only get certain "posts" in your stream. But what is the point of having an activity stream on a high traffic board? It's so clumsy at what it should be doing.
Instead of letting you know which topics have new posts so you can get up to date, you face an endless stream of new posts (often from one and the same topic).
Basically what I'm asking si how the h**** should I be using this feature to help me browse the board? It obviously isn't doing its job properly but I'll allow the possibility that I'm just not using it as it was intended.
Can anyone help me understand this thing better? And why we can't simlpy have a choice of both (the old new content list and activity stream)? This way it just seems it was forced onto users.