Fred Bauder said:
We could have two recent changes, one that has everything, another that has pages of interest, a sort of watchlist for everyone that had all pages that were embroiled in controversy listed.
That's easy enough to do. I think there is already a page for listing controversial articles. Suppose it's called [[Wikipedia:Foo]], a link to get recent changes related to articles listed on this page would be something like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Wikipedia:Foo
Just pop that on your user page and click it when you want to watch recent changes to controversial articles.