In addition to increasing the number of products as EGOL suggests, I'd also include the number of products directly in the Meta Description field for the primary landing page.  Pagination is important for user experience.  Using Javascript could cause problems with search engines properly discovering all the products.

There's no one right answer here.  So many factors to consider.

1. Real Word Testing

For example, have you ever done heat maps or click tracking with a solution like CrazyEgg?  I ask because it could turn out to be that the "recent free reports" box gets hardly enough clicks to warrant it's being kept as compared to the "Browse Topics" links.

2. Existing On Page Optimization

From a different perspective, You've only got "fair" optimization on the individual topic landing pages.  For example, when I go to the link for the Debt Collection topic, it sends me to the url http://www.insidearm.com/browse-topics/?topicid=2515

When I look at this page I see the following flaws in your page level SEO:

You've got a weak page Title

No URL optimization

The overall keyword saturation across the entire page (including header area, main content area,k sidebar and footer areas causes significant dilution.

3.Section Level Sub-Navigation

When I'm in this section, the sub-category links do show up within the sidebar Topic link area for this section, yet the whole Topic nav box is way below the fold, which already causes a user experience problem.  Taking the further action of removing that box entirely would cause even more topical and user confusion.

4. Crawlability

At the code level, the page I reviewed has 385 links.  (65 of these are purely pointing to archives, and they're only at the code level, not seen by visitors, yet because they're there, search indexing crawlers do see them).  With so many links on a page, it's quite possible that search engines are not crawling your site as efficiently as they could be, which itself could be further harming your sites overall SEO in a way that needs to be factored when deciding which links on a page should or shouldn't be removed.

5.Perceived Duplicate Content Factor

All those links in the sidebar and footer - for the most part they're the same across the entire site correct?  If so, that's causing not only a topical dilution issue, it's also contributing to weakness in perceived unique page level content.

6.Sectional Navigation

SEO best practices DO call for a section level sub-navigation system up top or on the sidebar, though it should at least mostly be limited to links within that section.

As you can see there are many factors to consider before just randomly ripping out one thing because you want the visual space for something else you or someone else in the organization perceives to be important.  It's not something to take lightly because of that very impact you express concern over.

Glad to be of help Sha

Sitemap.xml files are one of many "hints" search engines use to evaluate, classify and otherwise associate relevance, importance and freshness of individual pages, and in turn, an entire site.

When the entire file flags every page with the same date/time it can have a negative impact, purely from the single-point signal perspective.  If the actual pages themselves have different date/time stamps at the HTML code level, those would counter the sitemap.xml file reporting, and either resolve it or just cause confusion.

Any time search engines have a potential conflict that needs to be resolved, the potential for less than maximum value exists.

Because of these combined potential problems, SEO best practices dictate that this issue be resolved, so as to ensure it does not, in fact, lead to problems, however minor they might be on a per-page basis.  If resolving the issue takes an extensive amount of time, an evaluation of how important the issue is to overall SEO.   At a certain point, you cross into the realm of diminishing returns.