Reddit is too confusing for me. I guess users like you who have spent a lot of time there, know their way around. I use New and Trending quite often. They serve their purpose. I can't think of thing to improve there.
However, I have been thinking about Promoted section lately, even decided to make a post with a proposal to make changes to make it work. I think Promoted can become very useful if it was incentivized for people to visit it. If more people are incentivized to visit promote section, more authors will start actually using promote feature and burning Steem/SBD, and it would be great for investors like you, because value of Steem would rise as a result of burning.
Steem does have a good advantage in that it is much more Noob Friendly. I too would like to see some added incentive for people to look at the promoted section as it would increase the value of the Coin and the platform greatly.