- Fix an issue, where assignments, having an above-zero attempt_count, were finding their way to the results, just because they were prioritized based on their boost_level or pub_year. Apart from retrying the old failed assignments sooner, the non-yet-processed boosted-publications were pushed out to the workers much slower.
- Simplify the query, by removing the internal "ordering" and "limit", which had performance benefits when we did not need additional ordering for "level" and "pub_year". Back then, we wanted to apply the final orderings to as few rows as possible.