Not necessarily, I usually scan for new discussions whenever I get to the thread. How about two views in that case, one for condensed (only linking to the thread), and the wider one pretty much what we already have today (linking to the post)
Alternately, is there any way to highlight posts by recency within a thread, such as say by them having a darker shade background box. If you can store when the thread was last visited by the profile and check with the thread's comment timings, that would work just as well