The last post area serves a purpose, and while it is probably not used to click through much (I use it only occasionally as I use What's New and mass reply or read posts), and its purpose is to show the last post, and information regarding it (date of the post, and the author).
Comparably, if it were removed the node listing would look sparse and bland. As it does serve an use, anything that was added to fill its void would likely be lacking equally in usage, or would be nothing more than eye candy serving no real reason for being there other than to fill the void.
i once was able to rejigger my old vb install to remove that last post data and instead posted a list of the last x amount of posts in that entire section
so lets say i had a comic book section and had batman, superman, the atom, the blue beetle, and the wonder twins
well most people are going to care about batman and superman and only a few people are going to really care about the atom or blue beetle or the wonder twins
so those other 3 lesser superheroes dont really have the traffic enough to have their latest post (which might be from like a week ago) cluttering up the section that could better be used by more batman and superman content
so what i did effectively replaced what is there by default with only the newest news for the section which would 99% of the time be batman or superman related
i used something similar for another site where i had like 20 forums per section
so i hid all the forums completely from the main page and just showed the sections but placed a grid of icons that represent those hidden forums
this allows for much less real estate to be used in the initial page
instead of 10 sections with 20 forums each we just had 10 sections that showed a small grid of icons
cut the size of the page by more than half, way more than half
and to the right side i placed a list of the last x amount of posts in that particular section
so in each sections only about half of the forums were really active
the rest were there to be slowly built up and because they were part of a league structure of a sport where each leagues teams had to be given a forum even if there was not much of a following for certain teams
this way the last post from like a year ago for that team does not have to continue cluttering up the initial page of your forum
instead you get just the information from the forums your users use the most for that particular section
and everybody wins
i btw, have no coding skills at all
but just reading the forums at vb or here you can cut and paste your way to a lot of stuff
sure that is looked down upon by codes and designers, but for those of us with no skill its always a blessing when someone posts copies of how they did certain things for the rest of us to share and use
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