Yeah, you definitely need a couple Mastodon accounts and a Pleroma one just to be sure you aren't missing out!

Have you tried the "New" tab in the Network page? It might be what you want.

Also for the absence of notifications for likes, I feel it is a bad middle ground. I came to loathe this house notification badge for this reason. I love that I'm not getting a hard notification every time someone likes one of my publication, but I'm still compelled to look by this awful badge.

That's an additional feature. It's probably not enabled by default

You can trust me

I do have around 5 or 6 Diaspora accounts, 3 Friendica accounts (not counted the bots and test accounts), 1 Mastodon account, 1 Pleroma account, 1 Hubzilla account, 2 GNU Social accounts, 2 pump.io accounts, ...

Settings -> Additional features -> Network Tabs -> "Network New Tab"