Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've actually had this discussion a few times   My prime example is always The Telegraph who was SEO'd by Distilled (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).  If you look at their menu structure they utilize submenus for each section to limit the number of links on a given page.  Granted, they have a massive amount of authority, but they are still trying to best harness how it passes through the website. By clicking on 'World News' you get a sub-menu of different regions.  By clicking 'European News' you get another sub-menu for different countries/topics in Europe. This allows you to pump as much authority as you can into your main topics, and makes sure that you have the most relevant links while in the sub-topics. So, if ranking internal pages isn't important in your strategy, go ahead and forget about it.  However, if you want your deeper pages to rank well you should consider how reckless you are with your internal links.  You will be pleasantly surprised by the results.