Dealing with Expired & Reoccurring Content At Scale

[triveraseo]

Hello,

I have a question concerning maintenance & pruning content with a large site that has a ton of pages that are either expired OR reoccurring.

Firstly, there's ~ 12,000 pages on the site. They have large sections of the site that have individual landing pages for time-sensitive content, such as promotions and shows. They have TONS of shows every day, so the # of page to manage keeps exponentially increasing.

Show URLs:

• I'm auditing the show URLs and looking at pages that have backlinks. With those, I am redirecting to the main show pages. 
  -However, there are significant # of show URLs that are from a few years ago (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) that DON'T get traffic or have any backlinks (or ranking keywords). Can I delete these pages entirely from the site, or should I go through the process of 410-ing them (and then deleting? or ...?)Can you let 410's sit?)? They are in the XML sitemap right now, so they get crawled, but are essentially useless, and I want to cut off the dead weight, but I'm worried about deleting a large # of pages from the site at once.
• For show URLs that are still obsolete, but rank well in terms of kewyords and get some traffic...is there any recommended option? Should I bother adding them to a past shows archive section or not since they are bringing in a LITTLE traffic? Or ax them since it's such a small amount of traffic compared to what they get from the main pages.
• There are URLs that are orphaned and obsolete right now, but will reoccur. For instance, when an artist performs, they get their own landing page, they may acquire some backlinks and rank, but then that artist doesn't come back for a few months. The page just sits there, orphaned and in the XML sitemap. However, regardless of back-links/keywords, the page will come back eventually. Is there any recommended way to maintain this kind of situation? Again, there are a LOT of URLs in this same boat.

Promotional URLs:

• I'm going about the same process for promotions and thankfully, the scale of hte issue is much less. However, same question as above...they have some promotional URLs, like NYE Special Menu landing pages or Lent-Specials, etc, for each of their restaurants. These pages are only valid for a short amount of time each year, and otherwise, are obsolete. I want to reuse the pages each year, though, but don't want them to just sit there in the XML sitemap. Is there ever an instance where I might want to 302 redirect them, and then remove the 302 for the short amount of time they are valid?

I'm not AS concerned about the recycled promotional URLs. There are much fewer URLs in this category. However, as you can probably tell, this large site has this problem of reoccurring content throughout, and I'd like to get a plan in place to clean it up and then create rules to maintain. Promotional URLs that reoccur are smaller, so if they are orphaned, not the end of the world, but there are thousands of show URLs with this issue, so I really need to determine the best play here.

Any help is MUCH appreciated!