Interesting - maybe others will comment
I understand Jaxel's design goal of keeping XenCarta as a simple, very light weight product that just provides the subset of a "full" wiki that most folk running forums need. And I'm totally for that.
This product is a blessing for me, exactly what I needed to replace our MediaWiki, which was like using an 18 wheeler to haul a bag of peanuts around. We probably only used about 20% of the functionality MediaWiki provided, it was a nightmare to administer, and had zero integration with our support forums.
Now I have something which is ten times easier to administer, does 95% of what I need, and is fully integrated into the forums. Just the forum search integration, and the anti-spam defenses XF and various addons provide, will save me a huge amount of support work. And my hope is that it will also encourage users to contribute to the wiki, now that it's as simple as posting on the forums.
That said, there's a couple of things I really think would be useful, like supporting wiki markup to help in migrating from a an existing wiki, which I've monologed about in previous posts on this thread, and which I put in to production on my site this morning. Perhaps foolishly, as I should have waited for a response from Jaxel about at least adding a couple of hooks for me to use, but I needed my wiki up "now" on my newly migrated site. So I may end up having to manually re-do the changes I made to the code on every update to XenCarta, until I've had time to replace all the existing wiki markup with bbcode and templates.
Personally, I don't see my own wiki growing beyond about 250 pages, which while unwieldy to list in a single dropdown, is not unmanageable. But if there was an option to limit that dropdown, I'd probably use it, and set the limit to the same depth as the index, as our wiki structure is basically cast in stone, and nobody (except maybe members of staff) should be adding children to "leaf" pages more than 2 levels in.
But obviously it's Jaxel's choice, and he has to walk that fine line between "just the basics" and "useful features", to avoid Creeping Featurization (or Feeping Creaturization) and product bloat, thus defeating the object of the exercise.
I suspect the answer may be simply to provide hooks in some appropriate places, to allow those of us that need to extend XenCarta functionality to do so.
-- hugh