Well, it appears not everybody was happy with the change wrought by Hilighting Newest Nodes (implemented). While I found it only slightly surprising, I believe there's a larger issue which ought to be addressed.

Namely – that we should probably be making an effort towards consistency in how alternating rows are tagged in all sections of the site. Now NN does it one way, CB/Inbox does it a similar way, and various nodelets do it other ways. Personally, I think the odd-row/even-row tag scheme is the most generic. (At least as long we're content to only consider the two-row alternating case.)

In any case, if a style tag like highlight is going to be used in some section of the site where it previously wasn't, then probably it shouldn't have a default value supplied by the site.