I definitely agree that **Trending** and **Hot** are useless. About the only category they are useful for browsing is #contest and their usefulness is limited even there. **New** is slightly more useful but, like you said, full of junk. 

Something I've though about working on, after I complete my current downvote bot project, is to create an mute list with SteemConnect to let you mute all the spammers on a blacklist with minimal effort. Don't know how many people would use it, but it might be useful.

Right now though, I mainly upvote content in my feed since I try to keep it to stuff I'm interested in or original authors that need support. Most users in it come from my infrequent browsing of the feed or Discord users I meet.

I don't think the current site is where Steemit needs to be heading. I'd like to see more projects built on top of it like Utopian, dTube, and dLive. I think that is where Steem's potential lies. I'd personally love a chat room where you could upvote messages

That said, Steemit is around to stay and I think that as time goes on and more quality users join the platform, we will be able to reduce spam. Most spam accounts can be flagged into oblivion with concentrated effort. The whales that abuse the system are much harder to stop. Our only hope there is to get some good whales that contribute to the platform instead of exploiting it.

Just my rambling thoughts 😉