I'm right there with you. When I see long-time users complaining about the trending page, it throws me off a little. "What, you still look at that thing?"

For me, the front page of Steemit is my feed page. New people to follow is found by resteems from people I'm already following (don't neglect that resteem button when you see great content from people you want to support, folks!), or, occasionally, on tag pages. Heck, I still don't understand just what the difference between "Trending," "Hot," and "Promoted" are in terms of how the content appears on the respective pages…

Nonetheless, I can respect the opinion that, if we're going to have these "best of" pages, the content on them should be legitimately good.