Well first of all, check out SteemPeak.com. It is way better than steemit.com.

The reason tags are broken is a blockchain issue. They are not planning to fix it, since the plan is to move that logic out of the blockchain code and into hivemind. It still may take some time before that happens though, unfortunately.

I know communities are still one of the top priorities for the dev team. I also know they still have a ways to go on the development. It should get done, but probably not super soon.