We don’t pay a “new topic charge”. If you want to discuss something again, assuming you want to add new information and not just renegotiate something that was closed, open a new topic and link to the closed discussion.
Having said that: we explained our reasons for keeping the automatic deadline from the last reply.
On one hand we don’t want topics to get off-topic, so we auto-close after a
few days, yet we are fine with fragmenting the discussion by opening new
topics all the time? I don’t really follow the reasoning here.
In any case, with my docs/i18n coordinator hat on, I consider this a usability
blocker preventing migration of more user groups from mailing lists.