I think these are great suggestions. 
For the initial ‘slide across’ I tried to mirror all the category settings from Customization > Theme for simplicity, but there’s definitely scope for further tweaking. For the tiled view, I think having the right first screenshot for each could help give them a more consistent look in the category view, though you’re right that there may not be a ‘perfect’ one for each component/theme/plugin. If you filter by tag (including ‘no tags’) then they flip back to a regular topic list view. I prefer the list style layouts personally as they include the tag info, which I think may be useful.
Update: I’ve changed them to the listed view like the plugins.