NWF_Renim said:
As I stated before, especially with fishnets tag, such tags serve as valuable middle tier tags that can assist in searches, especially with minus searches. As I pointed out, fishnet legwear alone accounts for at least 2/3rds of the fishnets tags. Searching for non-legwear fishnets after purging this middle-tier tag would make it that much harder to find non-legwear fishnet garments without having to add several other minus tags.
The fact that we don't do this kind of stuff with other tags isn't a proper justification for not doing it, and if anything should raise the question on why haven't we been using them instead with more massive tags. The complaint that some tags are so massive that they effectively are useless and that these specific subtags more or less become useless in helping to sort the larger tag should suggest that we should have been considering having these mid-tier tags to help better sort the parent tag to begin with.
Most fishnet legwear is pantyhose or thighhighs. If you want "fishnets without legwear" then you can do fishnets -fishnet_pantyhose -fishnet_thighhighs. I don't think this is much more of a burden than doing fishnets -fishnet_legwear. Not enough to justify keeping the tag. It's more to type but it's not the kind of search you do every day.
I think our priorities have been backwards here. We don't care about how hard it is to do simple searches like fishnet pantyhose or fishnet thighhighs, but we do care about uncommon searches like "fishnets without legwear".
The cost of midtier umbrella tags is that a single piece of clothing gets upwards of five tags: fishnets, fishnet legwear, fishnet pantyhose, black legwear, and black pantyhose. Multiply that across every piece of clothing and you've got 5 or more tags for every piece of clothing on the post. Meanwhile replacing fishnet legwear with fishnet pantyhose increases precision without increasing tags per post.
The other cost is people not tagging the actual type of legwear. We've got tens of thousands of *_legwear posts missing the thighhighs or pantyhose tags because of people tagging the legwear color and that's it. We tell people to search things like fishnet_legwear pantyhose, but it doesn't actually work because of how many posts aren't tagged with the type of legwear.