Totally understandable that it is not worth all that for a simple convenience. I am still very impressed and grateful you went through all that effort to look into it though. As I said, I feel no entitlement for anything, including with this. It was awesome to hear a follow up on this though. Thank you so much for checking into this. Maybe I’ll wait a few months and add in a totally separate personal request directly to to Discourse forums asking they consider supporting something like following certain profiles. 
What would be awesome is if Discourse built in a personal setting where each individual could select whether or not they wanted to allow others to be able to “follow” them. Then if someone is being harrassed, they can just deselect the follow option for a while on their own, while some employees could allow it for our convenience. I might throw in my 2 cents to discourse about considering such a thing which would resolve a lot of the hesitation if people have the option to allow it or not on their own (maybe default to disabled but allow it to be turned on).
Anyway, thanks again for looking into it. I am not hurt by the outcome at all, but it has given me some good ideas to bring up as suggestions to them on a personal level.