I'd recommend fixing the upload dates. I get updates on my watched threads that say something new has been posted today but when I look it's from over a month ago despite the post being dated to today(a new post can't have comments from over a month ago).
Either way I don't know how long the settings take to update. Some settings update immediately and some settings only update when the site refreshes user data, which could be several minutes or hours.
It's also worth noting that there are some known bugs in the software the forum runs on that simply cannot be fixed by the site. Notifications sometimes get broken when people make replies that get deleted or you might not always get a notification for a future reply if you have an unread notification in the same thread for an earlier reply you haven't checked yet. Generally this happens the most on popular threads where people are constantly replying with reposts, off topic stuff, or other stuff that needs to be moved or deleted. This thread in particular is a big offender for those sorts of things. If it weren't constantly being cleaned and moderated the 25 pages of posts we have now would easily be double that, probably even more.