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The development Team works pretty hard as far as I see in Trac. Don't blame them, there should be more coders in our community anyway. The bigger community, the better help.

I'll try to come up with something as far as your solution is concerned.

EDIT

Solution to distinguish the rows... logic blocks.

<!-- IF {FORUMS_TOPICS_ROW_ICON} = 'skins/sed-light/img/system/posts_hot.gif' -->
blabla

<!-- ENDIF -->

It will allow you to change the whole row look and feel :P

Now I think that thing you want might be written in a plugin, I'll check this out.