Also, you don't lose the prior deprecated topics? They still exist and can link and be linked to, correct?
Yep. They're still there, you can link to them, edit them, etc. You can't add new items using the Deprecated category. Any existing ones are crossed out in your list of Topics/Articles:
...which you might find visually annoying if you were to leave them alone.
When they first made this change there were crashing bugs when messing with deprecated Categories or Topics/Articles using them, but they have since been fixed.
Starting from scratch and creating all your own topics from scratch seems like a lot of work to avoid a minor risk.
Perhaps, but it's just one reason among many. (I even said so in the text you quoted.)
My decision to go with custom Categories was made before RW was officially released, long before I had a publicly deprecated Category and an instance of it to play with and even longer (since it's not out yet) before we would have the ability to share/purchase content. In those days LWD was making changes to the Global Categories on a more regular basis and sometimes those changes would include changing your content to match. (Build 157 shows one of those times, if you want to scroll to almost the bottom of the Release Notes.) While most of the changes were minor or additions, I don't want them changing my content behind my back. Thus separation from the Globals.
If I can be so bold, and if I remember correctly, the MAIN reason for you going through this effort is because you use RW for Paranoia and you don't find the default topics & articles, categories & tags particularly suited for that system. If you were playing, say, Pathfinder, would you STILL have nuked (or hidden) everything and started from scratch?
Probably? Pathfinder (and D&D 3.x by extension) is the weird potential exception since it's the system for which the Global Categories were designed. The farther you move from the 3.x base, the less various bits in the Global Categories apply. You can even see this in the Tutorial realm, where the Topics mostly don't have the Auto-Add Pathfinder/3.x Snippets.
I've said in the past that the Global Categories are "too specific in their genericness". To me, they have too many "idea" type sections/snippets that I'm unlikely to ever use regardless of system, and too many system-specific ones for Pathfinder/3.x. While I could leave them and either clear out the blank ones every time I make a new Topic/Article or duplicate existing Topics/Articles with my changes, I prefer to cut down on duplicated effort. If I make a structural change more than once, I consider making a new Category.
FWIW, most of my Paranoia custom Categories are created before ever making an item that use them. I look at the related Global Categories and prototype a Category that I think will work. Sometimes I create an item using the Global Category, put in a sample item making whatever changes, and create a new Category to match, but normally I can look at the related Global and my other Paranoia Categories and figure what changes I want.
The above talk may make it sound like I'm creating creating new Categories all the time, but that isn't true. They are Categories, after all, and most of what you input is content. I just like having a good base for that content.
Other notes: Most (if not all) of my custom Categories are duplicated and adapted from an existing Category. I don't delete or alter the Global ones; I just hide them. That's the best of both worlds: no dealing with Protection, you can still safely import things (though RW should handle that itself), and if there are ideas you like that LWD adds later you can recreate them in your own Categories.
Everything said above about Global Categories also applies to the Global Tag Domains.
Hope this sheds some light on the subject.
