The key thing is that different people are interested in different things, not whether one section is generally more popular than others -- by making the sidebar as customisable as possible people can choose to highlight the sections of the site they get most benefit from, and in some cases this may not be 'newest nodes'.

That said, a default 'newest nodes' nodelet rather than a crafted personal nodelet would be nice, and probably more viable.

I'm not a big fan of new nodelets that require lots of database activity in order to construct. It just puts more load on the often-overloaded database server to calculate complex nodelets on every single page load when, for so many of the page loads you aren't going to even look at that particular nodelet.

For example, the "Other Users" nodelet can generate a significant amount of database load. There are many ways to fix this and it has been in my plans for some time but it hasn't been done yet.

At some point we should have a much better caching system and this type of stuff can be made many times more efficient. But we need to spend time implementing the better caching before we spend much time implementing new features that probably need it.

Nodelets are nice, but provided the site is fast enough it'd be painless to bring up another page to look up the information. :)

Makeshifts last the longest.