I think it's much better than having the top bar cause issues on mobile devices due to it being too wide. The width issue was especially apparent when viewing the site while not logged in.
Thankfully the server is beefy enough to handle both the additional trophy criteria and similar threads, as they can both be quite resource intensive. Before the add-on was fixed, I was worried that the server wasn't simply able to handle the additional queries, but I'm glad that wasn't the...
If you had watched all forums for new messages, I bet you would have gotten more. You could create an email account specific to BYC, and create an alternate account with that email, and then watch the forums.