What I think we have are several related fields.
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The “essential” life and death patterns, catered to by this thread and also Sensei’s Library.
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The “esoteric” life and death patterns, aka tsumego, catered to largely by A tsumego a day keeps the doctor away.
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The “regular” shapes, that again don’t immediate devolve into life and death. Discussion of these mainly takes place on Sensei’s Library.
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The “esoteric shapes”, that aren’t usually associated with immediate life and death. Those have been getting posted in Share your shapes.
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Joseki. These are discussed on OJE and many different threads in the Joseki category.
It seems to me that the boundaries between these five putative zones of discussion are pretty blurry.
For instance, consider this shape that I discussed in Monster seki!
If White tenukis now, as in the game I discussed, does his group become 1) an essential life and death pattern and worthy of discussion here?
Or is there no danger to White and it’s still 3) a regular or 4) esoteric shape, or is the idea of White playing away so uncommon that it’s 2) an esoteric life and death pattern?
Or are we still in the realm of 5) joseki?
I like to use three terms to discuss joseki. The joseki sensu stricto are considered the best, then the junseki which are flawed to a varying degree but playable, and finally the noseki which feature one or more real mistakes. I suppose the junseki and noseki are also in the realm of “joseki discussion”.
Perhaps one fruitful searching ground for this thread would be the joseki discussed in The Hurt / Heal Joseki Game: people are clearly interested in this set of joseki, so perhaps the “essential joseki” will lead to “essential life and death patterns” that can be discussed.