I agree with much of what you say here.

Whereas Steemit the social platform is perhaps a but sketchy, Steem the project seems to be doing pretty well.

I've started using SteemPeak ( Hive account@steempeak ) to do most of my posting; much more modern and usable while being just a "wrapper," not a separate project like Busy or Dtube.

As for Steemit, we now have bigger fish to fry than just the worry about the Trending page; we have a number of new SMT-based apps like dLike, ActiFit and others who will be serving their respective functions perfectly, but each dumping their own "feeds" into the Steemit stream.

The user interface here needs to be at least updated to allow users to filter/filter out separate feeds for each front end, or it's all going to be a giant mess. Alternately, serious bloggers/contributors need to be "re-trained" to treat an app like SteemPeak as their primary entry post, with Steemit becoming more like just a straight "blockchain viewer" and less of a posting platform.

This is not an easy challenge to solve...

=^..=