We would also like to see pinned subcategory topics not ‘pollute’ the category list. I think by default they should only show up in the subcategory.
Each of our main product categories has 4-5 subcategories. Many of our users would probably like to just observe a product category, but half the screen is taken by the subcategory descriptions.
As noted above, users can learn to unpin them, so its not the end of the world, but I think changing the default behavior would be an improvement.
If we really want to promote things more globally we can use the ‘pin globally’ feature.
Perhaps there’s a use case for an optional ‘pin to parent category’ like what happens today, but I think we could do without it.