The “manual bump” was more than just an increment of the “date” of your project. I also tagged your game in a way that makes it eligible to appear on the homepage outside of direct recommendations/followers (The “fresh games” section).
I see, thanks for that clarification and for applying that tag.
I also appreciate that you are listening this far and trying to clarify things. With your latest reply I feel we are finally at least talking about the same things.
There are a lot of edge cases that could influence when a page was actually “published”. (For example, in response to your own suggestion: a developer could easily accidentally “publish” their page, then take it down, leave it up for some time as unindexed, then publish it again later and wonder why it’s not showing up in most recent)
Sure, with my suggestion such edge cases would still require a human review, so no worse than today.
But the more sensible case of first having a game not available (and thus not indexed) though it has a public page, and later make it available (so it's indexed) would work much better out of the box without any human review needed.
My point is that using the first time a game is indexed as its "initial time" is just the sensible baseline and has only advantages and no disadvantages compared to using an "initial time" that precedes the game being indexed at all. There is just no argument for using an "initial time" that is earlier than the first time of being indexed.
We want to encourage people to write a devlog when they change their page substantially (or even on project launch). (...) Just keep in mind that some stages may require a human review, so there may be a delay before the system processes your page.
Yes, the human reviews are slow and/or unreliable. Again, I did make a "major update" tagged devlog shortly after my game was available for download and indexed, but there was no effect from that in the three days between I posted it and you applied your bump, so either it was not picked up in human review, or it was still in queue after three days.
This is not a complaint over the human reviews not being more efficient - I know there are limited resources and a huge amount of games and so on. Rather, it just supports my argument that it's sensible to not rely on human reviews for things where the system could be improved in a way that would make some of those human reviews less critical. Anything that can work better in an automated way would both benefit developers and ease the load on human reviews.