Thanks for the link Jaffa. None of the proposed additions there seem to address this in a completely general fashion except the facets part, which could be used for the same purpose in a less coherent way than what i suggested, but has other advantages.

This seems to be a fairly important UI issue to avoid "the breakdown of the app store" (lcuk's words on IRC) while it's still early enough to standardize on an approach, but isn't getting much discussion. Is that because it's not really up to us with HAM being out of our control?

This would probably be better as a brainstorm, now that there's a clearly defined problem with no current solutions, and at least one proposed solution. The brainstorm page is taking forever to load but if it ever does i'll set it up as a brainstorm so that it can be opened up for input from the whole community.