This is kind of a good point. The plan is to shift more activity and attention toward communities rather than one unified Trending. If you're interested in cars or whatever, you go to the cars community and see what interests you, not what happens to interest other Steem voters.
The reason for what you call circle jerking is that the only thing all of us really have in common is being Steem users. Once we're better able to focus on our actual interests, the experience should improve. That is the theory at least.