The term "bikeshedding" comes up a lot on HN, when people spend a lot of time spinning wheels in endless debates about the things that are easy to debate while indefinitely deferring the tough conversations, but I think an underappreciated aspect of this meme is that the unimportant conversations quite frequently really are just that; unimportant, to everybody involved. Often (but not always) nobody actually cares. Caring is not necessarily represented by the amount of time or text spewed forth on a topic. A lot of things other than passion or importance factor into how much verbiage comes through and it is a mistake to overinterpret mere volume.

Unfortunately, the flip side of this coin is harder to deal with; sometimes truly important issues or things that people do deeply care about have disproportionately too little verbiage. Finding those can be very difficult.