I think I'm with Ipstenu on this (Mika Epstein). If your stats show that archives are being used, then maybe they are important. If not, it is not necessarily a reflection on the user interface, it may be that they aren't important.

The usefulness of date-based archives is probably inversely proportional to how technical your content topics are. For someone writing about WordPress, SEO, etc. having a date-based archive which allows readers to look 3 or 4 years into the past has very little value (at least to me.)

Fundamentally, I would say we need to serve two kinds of people: 1) hunters (people who know what they want) and 2) browsers (people who enjoy wandering around and munching on whatever strikes their fancy.) I'm in "hunter" mode about 90+% of the time, and in "browser" mode 10% or less of the time.

I'm not sure what mode archive pages serve -- "historical researcher" mode? I have yet to meet one of those folks -- at least in any domain that is evolving as fast as WordPress technology, SEO, etc.