The two most recent sections that I can remember RAT and Tidings were brain children of members of the inner circle.

Those aren't sections. RAT is just a node lister, and Tidings is a wiki. The youngest section is Inner Scriptorium, which was created on 2004-09-09. Even so, your point is valid, as it too was motivated from within the circle.

The problem with sections, IMHO, is that they allow only a single label on any given node (a node cannot be in multiple sections), and the range of those labels is very small and static. The obvious solution, IMHO, is for nodes to be taggable with multiple keywords from an extended controlled vocabulary.