I think a lot of the points you brought up here are some that will get fixed or reshaped with communities and then hopefully with SMT's. I personally never check trending, which sometimes makes me miss important posts or people that have joined the platform but the vote-trading which is basically like self-voting 100% daily is what makes me not look there anymore. When I have free voting power to just curate for the sake of curation I find myself more often checking through tags in hot/new and tags that aren't as popular or abused.
I really do think communities will help this a lot, it will incentivize moderators of those communities to keep their tags clean and of high quality for other curators to spend more time in them much like subreddits work and grow.
SMT's will also change a bunch of things but its too early to say exactly how and what.
It feels weird responding to a comment knowing that the others above you may not read it. But oh well.
I really hope communities comes sooner rather than later, and I hope they don't wait for EOS before bringing them out, instead just keep EOS for the SMT's implementation. It's a hope because we all know we lose a lot of talented people everyday because they don't get discovered or it takes 1 month just to get approved.
It didn't take too long for Ben Lee, Donal Logue or Andreas M. Antonopoulos to get discovered here and it's great that they are here, but there are also people just as talented leaving frequently, I really hope communities changes that, allows us to discover people easier and more importantly keep them. That will make this place fun.
And OCD helps with that, great work building it.
I'm one of these: I'll believe it when I see it.
I hope we see change in the future but in the mean time, it would be nice to see some change.