Ray-
Alas, some of these wretched souls have ended up with rather large watchlists due to my "Watch articles by default" feature, so the 1 hour cutoff on large watchlists threatens their salvation.
I often wondered about the wisdom of that feature.
Unfortunately there's no easy way to make this the default only for non- minor edits, since we obviously don't know if the edit is minor until it is made (some JavaScript magic could be used, but that, too, is non- trivial, since we don't want the box to be unchecked if a minor edit is made to an already watched article). We could add an "Ignore watch request if edit is minor" option that is evaluated post-save, but that may be too confusing and would probably only end up being used by 4 people total, who activated it by accident and then leave a question on the Pump about mysterious watchlist behavior.
I intend to add an additional option that allows you to only watch newly created articles by default. Expiring watchlist entries after a certain default period (unless you make an edit in that period) may also help (but also has some screwup potential).
Regards,
Erik