I dug into this a bit more today - I was considering if I wanted to make a pull request to add a setting to the plugin. When enabled, the setting would force direct links to the category to forward the browser to the documentation index for the category. While looking at existing work on the plugin, I came across a much larger rework of the features that’s in progress: FEATURE: Add visual doc category index editor by megothss · Pull Request #87 · discourse/discourse-doc-categories · GitHub
It seems like it’d be a great time to add this kind of optional functionality for using the documentation index as the category listing. At the same time, it might conflict with a “Simple Mode” that @sam is developing within the update. Sam, do you see the option I described above as something that might fit into your work on Simple Mode or the larger work in the PR to provide more options for building the index? It’d be really awesome to be able to choose the simplified column setup you’re developing or to just use the index topic. Maybe even ideally, the contents of the post display above the full, normal or simple listing of the category.