I'm also tired of the use of '<whatever>-cruft' as a reason for deletion. There's a certain mindset that seems to think that the existence of articles on minor but factual and verifiable topics detracts from Wikipedia. To that, I'd say: everyone's pet interest is a fringe interest to someone. Whether a Wikipedia article should exist on a topic should have nothing to do with how well one can disparage the subset of people interested in that particular topic.
That said, if there's not enough to say about a topic, it might not deserve an article of its very own. I'm all in favor of e.g. grouping minor fictional characters together in an article 'Minor characters in <novel>', or whatever.
-Matt