Thanks for the response.  To clarify... you're suggesting we link internally from our highest PR pages to pages deep inside the catalog (ie. product pages)?

When building very large ecommerce sites, the catalog data can have millions of product SKUs and a massive quantity of hierarchical navigation layers (say 7-10) to get to those SKUs.  On such sites, it can be difficult to get them to index substantially.  The issue doesn’t appear to be product page content issues.  The concern is around the ‘intermediate’ pages -- the many navigation layers between the home page and the product pages that are necessary for a user to funnel down and find the desired product.  There are a lot of these intermediate pages and they commonly contain just a few menu links and thin/no content.  (It's tough to put fresh-unique-quality content on all the intermediate pages that serve the purpose of helping the user navigate a big catalog.)  We've played with NO INDEX, FOLLOW on these pages.  But structurally it seems like a site with a lot of intermediate pages containing thin content can result in issues such as shallow site indexing, weak page rank, crawl budget issues, etc.  Any creative suggestions on how to tackle this?