Makes sense, Robin. It gets tricky using a combination of widget decoration and plugin outlets. Since there’s no intent to port the topic list away from the raw templates (and I don’t disagree with this decision), it makes it difficult to work with the existing plugin outlets within the topic-list-item.
In my thinking, it would make sense to add a plugin outlet at the beginning of the loop in the topic-list:
Since there are a number of outlets being deprecated in exchange for widgets, I don’t think it would be too much to ask for an add. I’d be happy to create the PR if this is an acceptable way of coming at this.
I know there are more than one request for functionality being added to a topic list item (liking, bookmarking, voting) and this would make that process a lot easier.