Alternate Colors and sort by number of posts in unread topics

When browsing through topics for people that need help, I sometimes find it useful to look for topics with the smallest number of posts to see what people haven't been reached or what posters are not already being helped by several different people.

Unfortunately sorting by posts sorts ALL topics not just topics with unread posts in them. Is there some way this could be changed or some kind of function added that will sort topics by number of posts and put unread topics first so that you can see all the recent topics with small amounts of posts?

Also, at the very least could the color of every other row in the topic list be alternated to a gray or something so that number of posts for a given topic can be easily determined. When the value is so far from the title and they are all the same color it makes it hard to match up topic titles with attributes.