This still doesn't answer my question: what do we do with the small unrelated suggestions (like Longer Chains or my Paint Stuff suggestion)? thow it in a "misc suggestions" suggestion, or just not suggest them at all?
I believe the answer to that was that things like "Longer Chains" or "Paint Stuff" are probably never going to become top-the-charts popular on their own, as it would apply to the desires of such a small percentage of the voting base. It would likely, however, be better to suggest things as part of a broader sweep, such as the Improved Mechanics thread, which really explored the way that we could have automated systems in DF to take advantage of the power system.
This is, in part, why I am frequently mentioning in many of these smaller suggestion threads that modding should be able to replicate many of the suggestions, and that we should encourage Toady to give us more flexibility in the raws, so that we can produce these sorts of things ourselves, as giving us the tools to make a thousand little suggestions come true ourselves is better than hand-picking a half-dozen little suggestions to be hard-coded.
This would, in fact, be one of the strengths of the ESV system as it stands: by making people prioritize, it tends to promote suggestions, even small suggestions, that have the broadest demand.
That said, once again, Toady at least attempts to read all the suggestions on this board (although the more the board gets flooded with redundant suggestions, the more and more he'll likely get behind,) and he is an intelligent and capable person who can recognize when some ideas are fairly easy to impliment and would make at least a smaller portion of the playerbase happy for minimal cost to himself, or can simply throw in something because he just plain likes the idea himself.