From what i saw till now, the recent posts widget can be much better, it Shows all the new posts from one topic and not last one, result of this is the list is full of replies from one topic, members dont see the new posts from other topics so less pages read.
The best option should be ONE last post from each topic that links you to the older unread post of the topic
If there is way to make it work like this forgive me , i am new to this forum.
One example from the addons forum that i just saw,
this is really not nice for members less pages per user ,
but except that is not user friendly to see the same title one time after the other.
I understand that you want have some options to filter and display more posts from other topics, but I'm sorry there is no such options yet. Recent Posts widget means Recent Posts widget. It displays recent posts. It doesn't matter where that posts from. In your case all recent posts are from one topic but it doesn't mean this widget only shows posts from one topic. It shows recent added posts. There is no any wrong things here and this is not a problem. This is a simple recent post widget and you should not expect an advanced things here.
The problem is that you want more options and filtering features. These features are already in our to-do list and they'll be added as soon as possible.
