I think the feature request [0] will be a useful one. As Marc mentioned we need the think about saving the space in navigation panel. What about use 2 radio buttons to switch between Recent Tables and the Favourite Tables with the same drop down as displayed in the image [1]. Using a tool tip for radio buttons will help to familiar with this feature.

To make it more configurable, we can use two global variables for enabling this feature and for default radio selection (whether Recent Tables by default or Favourite Tables by default). I didn't look into the implementations yet. But I think it should be possible.