Theories should go up in smoke. Speculation is disallowed. You're undervaluing the place of the topic page itself. These are articles about stories; they aren't meant to replace or even do anything remotely similar to topic pages. You want info about banana, go to banana. Don't list it all at The Girl in the Fireplace. That's a total misuse of the page.
This is a wiki. There's a search bar. And because we're not Wikipedia, we can indulge in articles about minor nouns.
Thinning down these typically bloated sections in no way deprives our readers of info. It merely shows that we've got some kind of editorial self-restraint.
Bullet point sections encourage people to put anything they want on an article without even attempting to integrate their thoughts into a larger whole.
It's perfectly acceptable for Joe Editor to give up on placing a piece of minutiae on an article because — ya know what? — it doesn't actually fit.
When it comes to those tiny, throw-away references, I'm still in favour of having a single piece of prose that says, "Amongst the things mentioned in this article were: bananas, kronkburgers and Yorkshire pudding" — and call it a day.
Oh and I think you're wrong in your second paragraph. The thing that binds these sentences together is "continuity" in general. You can write a paragraph that has sentences that appear disparate because they're all about continuity. Remember, we're talking real world articles here, so the tie that binds is the fact that we're talking continuity — not necessarily that one sentence is related to the other as topics within the DWU. What relates them is that they are all aspects of TGITF that weave into the broader continuity of DW.