I think the old topics for Babble and Topic List Previews were a fair bit longer before they were “archived”, but yes I think traditional topic structure does not suit plugin topics very well.
This is a significant reason why we now have Feature Request and Bug Report wizards on thepavilion.io. The idea is to divert a fair chunk of plugin-related discussion there, and use this topic as a “landing page” of sorts.
We have plans to better advertise / structure that relationship in the near future.