From what I understand, an 'archived' item is kind of like 'deleted', where you do not care about it anymore.  If that is the case, then if you start to have lots of items that are 'archived', you can spend quite a bit of time in your API calls retrieving items that you do not care about, and having to filter through these items in your own code.  It would be great if when retrieving items in a collection, you could accept a GET parameter for something like:  'archived=false'

I think the same logic would apply for draft items as well.  Sometimes you would only want to interact with those items that are 'published'.