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Heh. I actually do make use of the last_modified date, myself. I've got a library of in-progress stories that I'm interested in reading when finished but not actively following as they're written, and since it's uncouth to use FFDL to "check for updates" on a regular basis I created a custom column that uses last_modified to flag stories that haven't been checked in certain intervals for update (with an exponentially-increasing gap between check times, so that frequently-updated fanfics get "pinged" as quickly as once a week and long-quiescent ones only get checked every six months or more). This ensures that if a story stops updating it will only be checked a few extraneous times before being automatically "given up on." It never occurred to me that updating a fanfic would result in last_modified being changed on other documents that hadn't been flagged for updating.
Since generally each author will only have one or two stories in-progress simultaneously the situation may not have occurred frequently enough to be noticeable for me, and even if it had happened it wouldn't really have made much difference (it would simply "renew hope" on a fanfic that should be heading out into once-a-year land and check it a few extra times before it goes back out there), but it's a use-case if you were curious to have one so I figured I'd mention it.
If you want to be more rigorous anyway, perhaps make it so that FFDL doesn't modify other fanfics if the update wouldn't actually change the contents of the fanfic's author link field to a new value?
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