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What is the visibility set to on the simple products for different sizes? If it's set to "Catalog" it will still be crawlable but not appear in your website's internal search results.
Setting the visibility to "Not Visible Individually" should resolve this issue.
I think what's happened here is Google has recognized that you have multiple pages with very similar content and disregarded all but one version and that version is ranking. It's probably been chosen because of how it fits in your site structure in compared to other pages with the similar content but there are other potential reasons i.e. inbound links.
Duplicate content can function as a link but only when it's published on a third party website in the form of a citation. For the citation to be counted the third party website in question would have to be authoritative and reputable (to filter out sites with scraped content).
Block them in robots.txt, there's no value in them being crawled.
To reiterate what Dave and Karl have said, don't worry about the number of links, worry about user experience. Do you feel that the navigation and design you've opted for delivers a great user experience?
As an aside, the average ecommerce website product category page has 3 links to every product; 1) product name, 2) product image, 3) call to action. It would be a poor user experience for any of those not to link to the product page.
Assuming you're not just using cheap press release services and are happy to invest time into PR activity to improve the chances of it being successful, it makes sense to tailor you press release for the audiences you send it out to.
Don't think of it in terms of unique vs duplicate content, consider whether the article is a good fit for the audience of the publisher you're pitching it to. If it isn't re-write it so it is.
What are the details of the warnings and errors being shown?
I think the advice would normally be to use the follow, no index Meta Robots for tags pages.
For archive pages use rel=canonical instead of Meta robots.