Most tag setups are worse than useless... they're the stuff that Panda's made of. Simple basic auto-tagging runs the chance of too many empty pages, thin-pages, and dupe content... ultimately not a satisfactory user experience.
I just saw an academic journal that had links to maybe 40 tag pages per article... not even tag clouds with different sized fonts to suggest which pages are likely to be more important than others. Instead, these were long small-font lists at the bottom of articles. The likelihood of these being useful to navigate is miniscule.
If you cut the number of tags way down and choose core categories, one might argue that these are effectively poor man's category pages. Barry, on seroundtable, has an arrangement that looks like it could be more help than harm, but I can't help but think that rewriting the titles and maybe adding a custom description line might help SER's current setup a bit more. I wonder if he's tried any finer breakdowns into hierarchies.
I've seen some sites that pick top categories by logging user queries and then using those as subcategories. Likely to work best if the number of categories is small... and different sites are likely to have different scenarios depending on user patterns. News sites could well be structured differently from sites that are more topical.
I personally have always felt that, within busy tag pages, archiving pages with sequentially numbered pagination is a makeshift way of frustrating the user, unless site search is very good... but browsing in this arrangement becomes useless. Relevant distribution of link juice most likely sucks.
As keyply suggests, some of this "micro management" is more trouble than it is worth
I don't think he said it was more trouble than it's worth. I think he effectively said that commonly used tagging schemes he's seen don't do anything useful.
Anyway, if you haven't guessed, I'm not a big fan of tags. Google's action with YouTube in 2012 suggested Google's unhappiness with them, not for search, but for user friendliness....
YouTube Makes Tags Private Aug-Sept 2012 https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4485756.htm [webmasterworld.com]
I think that have a limited number of well-selected related links directely on the prime article page is far better than tags in many ways, albeit harder to implement. Attempts have been made, on large social sites, to come up with ways of communally creating hierarchies in social tagging systems... but these too ran into the drawback of lazy tagging. See...
Organizing social tags into hierarchies 04/29/2006 - by Bill Slawski http://www.seobythesea.com/2006/04/organizing-social-tags-into-hierarchies/ [seobythesea.com]
