Particularly for doorway pages where I may not have had the actual content needed to carry the page, not to mention the page was cloaked. Themes and a good vertical linking structure as well as a good recip link program along with the proper directory structure and file naming scheme will most certainly present the appearance of topical relevancy. And not just the appearance. You go to that much effort and in the process you will create relevancy. Google counts links from your own site for link popularity only when they are in other subdirectories within the site.
Every separate topic is given it's own subdirectory.
I think this is a terrific pattern to follow. In fact it's little things like this that create consistency in a site. I believe that this consistency helps to build a stronger site and we should be considering these very things, from the beginning development of the site. I'm not sure I agree with that. Google always indents the subdirectories, which shows me they are credited but not as a separate domain.