The underlying problem is that the Trending page is the Steemit front page when you're not logged in. Before it became a plate of baked potatoes, it was a circlejerk filled by posts about Steem. The Steempeak front page looks much better, since it shows the posts selected by several curation trails.
Steemit may not want to show favoritism to a number of curation trails, but at this point, it would be better to display the New page as the front page, which would show how much activity there still is.
Even the Hot page could be better than trending as I think it relates to actual activity. A lot of high-paid posts do not have many comments. I want to see what people are getting excited about. There is no perfect system, but we should be doing what we can to make Steem look good.