I use a filter that someone came up with that's essentially what we used to have as our "active topics" option, and that makes it pretty easy to navigate all the threads I want to read.
From the ease-of-use perspective for a visitor, I am all for killing (most of) the mega-threads. But we also need to strike a balance where we don't have threads popping up all the time for each random post-game complaint. Would love to find a way to integrate the articles into appropriate threads, especially pertaining to offseason transactions.