Article Module for Drupal is an useful module, and is pretty easy to configure.
The Views module in Drupal does similar stuff, but it does take a lot of learning new terms, and likely even more CPU/Database usage. More importantly, it is a hugely complex module which brings with it risks of breakage when updating either just the Views module or updating the core Drupal release. So, it is worth keeping the simple Article module around.
One of the key missing things in the Article module is a way to make a block of "Recently Changed Articles" - it only provides for "Recently Created Articles". But this is an easy hack - edit the article/article.module file, and replace all n.created to n.changed.
That is it! Of course, the trouble is that updating the Article module now becomes tricky - but all this is probably still easier than dealing with updating the large Views module and core Drupal.
ToDo: add an user option to have article module support both n.created and n.changed as required for a specific block.