The issue I have with the "categories should be more like tags" comment that is posted almost identically every few weeks is that it assumes that if tags "happen", they'll be able to easily display results for combinations of tags... but assumes that categories can't display their subcontents, when the latter is probably easier than the former.
The thing about articles being sorted out of their main categories is that for categories like People, American people, Writers, etc., they're ludicrously huge. If articles were in all relevant categories with the current software, it'd be unworkable.
What I'd like to see technically is: 1) subcategories not being pushed to later pages by articles in the category. If a category contains two subcategories: "A" and "Z" and 200 articles starting with letters A-Y, Z appears on the second page. This makes article-full categories unnavigable. All the subcategories should come before any of the articles. 2) By default, categories only display articles which are not in any of their subcategories, but have a "show all articles in this category" link (which'd probably amount to a "&show=all" link). Using this would require a little better "hierarchy hygiene", though... whether subcategories are really /sub/categories... but we need that anyway. 3) If 2 were implemented, a "would be nice" option, that I fear might be more work on the server, would be to have a button/link next to each subcategory (like the tree [+]/[-] there now) that would add the articles in that subcategory to the displayed list of articles in the category.
-- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]