Your mama may have had eyes in the back of her head, but our admin team just can't see everything at once. It takes a village to make sure TVTropes is running the way it should, so when it comes to spotting tech snafus, dreaming up a better digital mousetrap, or just diagnosing plain old asshattery, the quicker you let us know something's up, the quicker we can address it. See a bug? Point to it and we'll squash it. Have idea for a new feature? Post in the Tech Wishlist.
NOTE: Do not post duplicate bug queries, please check existing queries to see if your issue has already been reported and then comment on it.
Finally figured it out. It was ~SeptimusHeap cutlisting the Playing With page for that trope. In the cutlist code it does this: delete from launches where title=?.
So whenever someone cutlists a page belonging to a trope, it removes it from the launches table, which is obviously pretty dumb if its not the actual trope page. So im sure this has lead to hundreds or even thousands of tropes being mistakenly removed from the launches table over the years. I think this finally solves the mystery of the disappearing launches.
Now Monitoring Query Bugs and Query Wishlistokay this should now be fixed moving forward to prevent anymore launches from disappearing.
Now Monitoring Query Bugs and Query Wishlist

Yesterday, Played Ball in College was displayed on the front page following its launch. Today, not only has it disappeared from the front page, it is not listed among the recent launches as well.
Not sure what's going on here but posting it here for visibility.