I think that would only solve this issue: "Once the Open Thread is more than a few days old, locating where it is can take more work."

There is significantly less visibility with posting in an already crowded thread, and that's the main reason people don't like posting in it after a few days. This is also a problem with the repositories and other similar pages. Maybe the current format is bad for this, and a different format would be better, in addition to a more prominent link.