Hm. It seems your concept of what people use Super Search for is different from mine. You seem to think that people use it to find nodes they've already seen, but maybe can't remember the title of, or don't have bookmarked, or whatever. I think people use Super Search to find whatever nodes may be relevant to their current interest, including — and I'd say particularly — nodes they've never seen before and have no clue about.

As a sort of orthogonal issue — what I feel is the essential issue in all of this — it is important, I believe, that what people see listed in Tutorials and what they'd find by doing a SSearch for Tutorials are exactly the same set of nodes. Such behavior would avoid violating the Principle of Least Surprise, and would keep Tutorials consistent with the other sections of the site, at least in this respect.

what is the problem with junk "tutorials" being left as junk tutorials that won't show up when you search for "Published in Tutorials" nodes?

Super Search does not currently support the ability to 'search for "Published in Tutorials" nodes'. It only lets you search for perltutorial nodes.

We could change that, obviously, but that would just increase the oddness of the Tutorials section, which I think is going in the wrong direction.

So, if I may, let me turn the question back to you: Why? Why keep junk tutorials as tutorials? Given that converting them to some out-of-the way node type, like perlmeditation or maybe document, is easily and harmlessly enough done.