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How will the site handle subtopics that are not apreciated by the majority of the main topic?
For example, many people in ~tech would not care about ~tech.apple and most people who care about Apple wouldn't care about ~tech.apple.jailbreak.
By the time there's 2800 sub-groups in ~tech, I kinda expect ~tech itself to be less of a community and more of a bestof/curated gateway that has the best stuff from those 2800 bubbling up into it. As the subgroups flourish, the root becomes less and less the place to submit content. By subscribing to ~tech in that later stage of its evolution, you're basically saying give me the best of ~tech.*. If you don't like seeing the apple content, you'd just filter out anything tagged with [apple] and never have to see it.
Speak of the 😈
@amarok has talked at length about potential mechanics for the parent-child (group-subgroup) relationships... but I forgot to bookmark many of them and they are basically impossible to find right now (since the Search feature is still in progress). However a quick and dirty answer based on memory:
One of the ideas discussed about handling the "bubble up" mechanic (content from subgroups showing in the parent groups) was allowing the trusted users in the parent groups to control how much content from the subgroups below them gets shown in their group. This can either be done through a basic setting (e.g. show only topics from subgroups with a performance-derived-value > mean performance in the group) or by manual control (e.g. trusted users voting on subgroup content to show in their higher tier group) amongst many other potentials.
However as it stands right now, as least on ~tildes, all the content from ~tildes.official is equally distributed in the parent but that is unlikely to remain the case for too long and there are plans to address the issues that brings up.