I totally agree that the newsfeed is getting useless if you follow too many people. That might be changed later on with a "favorite list" where you can have a separate list of only a fraction of all your follows.
Also, I really think it is unproductive to ask for followers. That is a killer to the system. You should mostly grow your followers organically and by that I mean that you should only try to follow people that you consider good content creators.