maybe there's a compromise there? Something along the lines of combining the ideas of TR with Summer Gaming into seasons? Like, maybe one season would be "Final Fantasy," and everyone can just pick whichever FF game they want to play and share progress/discuss; one season we have a list of 5 or 6 or so arcade games - say all Sega one season or all from 1991 or some other theme; another season could be um... a trilogy of adventure games?; another season could be a short-list of these "modern retro" games that have been discussed in another thread, and so on.
We could even just do seasons based on classic systems... one season could be to explore the list of games that defined the 2600, the next the Genesis, and so on. In that sense the lists already exist so it'd just be a matter of picking four systems to explore.
So like, we break it down into short-lists of themed classics, or single-game or series or whatever for longer/RPG games, but we have more time to play rather than one a month. I don't know, brainstorming...