Yeah, "Hot" seems completely unethical to me. Why should a conversation be worth more just because more people are talking about it? Haven't we been taught to learn to focus on issues that actually matter rather than the ones producing all the noise? I hope so.
However, "New" isn't without its faults, for conversations can then lose value due to their age, which is also wrong. That was the principle behind why I created the Community Projects & Permanent Threads hub as a way to retain the value in conversations that are essential and don't deserve to be overwritten just because they happened however long ago.
I wish the FANDOM developers would create a way for us to search for particular posts.