[msbarnett]

You can mute someone's retweets, while still seeing all tweets directly posted by that person. That's what I was referring to above.

But it can also be useful to just outright temporarily mute someone who's at an event or something and swamping your timeline with irrelevant tweets that you know are timeboxed and will soon return to normal. A 7 day mute or whatever beats unfollowing and forgetting to refollow.