Front page quality seems to have deteriorated. I brought this up in an Ask HN and I think I came off as self-righteous and that was my fault.

But I think the crux of the issue is I just don't get how certain low-quality stuff makes the front-page and a lot of high-quality stuff from new gets missed.

I've actually created an RSS feed that grabs anything in New that has gotten at least 1 upvote. It's a lot of content but at least it is going beyond what is displayed on the front page.