While we can appreciate your difficulty, we can't take a step backward and restore that old format for tab labels without having to also go back to 23 individual scripts. When something does blow up, it takes a lot longer to fix when each subdomain operates independently for those functions. A global domain function is much more efficient and expedient.
If you're a Windows user like me, opening stories in separate windows would allow you to peek at each window's thumbnail in the task bar. Just a thought, since that would give you a bit of privacy and the ability to check each window's content quickly. I'm not a Mac user, so I can't speak for how it works on a Mac, but I imagine it wouldn't be hugely different.