Totally agree. I think there's way too much reliance on the upvote button. Anywhere outside of Steemit curation is handled through a sharing mechanism, which in our case is the resteem. So, I don't know how that might work, or if it even could. When/if Communities shows up, I wonder how that will affect the trending/hot pages simply from the standpoint that the existing tag system will be modified in someway.

It's amazing how, even with recent updates and more communication over the last two weeks, we still don't know a whole lot of how things will ultimately be.