I’m guessing there are three reasons that Sense hasn’t done the deep work needed to offer “delete” and maybe “hide” features for smartplugs.
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The data pipeline - all device data is processed through Sense’s data pipeline to calculate other data on a regular basis. Results like Other, aggregated hourly, daily, monthly and bill trends (usage and costs), plus device statistics (timeline, smartplug Always On, times on/off), all depend on incoming device data. Think of the data pipeline as a spreadsheet - when you delete an input to a complex calculation, all the downstream calculations become REF!, until you clean up the calculation. Now you might say “why recalculate things once they have been computed ?”. Unfortunately, there are reasons that recalculations are needed - new models are discovered/detected and the results need to be backfilled, people readjust their energy costs and want to see historic results, plus Sense does allow us to delete natively detected devices which induces recalculations and backfill. But the whole Sense infrastructure has been built with adding and deleting devices/models in mind. But not smart plug data - see next bullet.
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Save the data - Sense is also a data-centric company so I suspect they are very resistant to getting rid of “ground truth” data. Ground truth data, is power data for a device, measured directly from the source (I.e. smart plug data, Sense monitor measured and calculated data). In machine learning, one treats ground truth data very differently than “predicted” data (i.e. native detections). In machine learning land, ground truth data is like the inputs to a spreadsheet and the native detections are calculated outputs (though the calculations are very different from the ones I talked about in the earlier bullet). I believe Sense has built a sophisticated data storage hierarchy for storing vast amounts of ground truth data with this model in mind.
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So the paradigm for deleting / repurposing smartplugs is very different from deleting and adding native device models. One final complexity is that the data stream associated with a smartplug is tied to the MAC address for that smart plug. There’s no easy way to tell Sense that the data stream from this MAC address is tied to one device prior to Nov 7 at 7am and tied to a different device after that. So not even an easy way to hide historic data from a smart plug if you are ever going to use a smart plug again.
Not trying to make excuses for Sense, but hinting at why it would be harder than a simple UX change.
That said, I feel your pain, having 6 historic devices rattling around in your device list - I would probably rename them with a s in front of their name so they go to the very bottom !