sorry for this late comment.. But about these:

Pictures and YouTube links without any explanation, plagiarism, rewrited guides "how to be successful" for newbies from another newbies, rewrited wiki articles, spam, beggers for upvotes/followers - we have tons of this on Steemit now.

The problem is, the more users the more these things get here...

For man, who is curating posts manually is hard to find something valuable. That's why I stopped to check "New". Sorry🙁

I feel you... even I who's not curator don't like the "new" right now... I can search new in anime/gaming/programming...etc but I wish there was better indexing system so we can search more specifically.

I'm searching for curators for my "best" posts... can I contact you? I promise I'll only send my "Best" to you... the posts that I spend a lot of time on.