Everything else had negligible benefit for me. I tried the French press and Aeropress thing a while but it's way too labor intensive for how much I drink (one "10" cup drip pot per day).
There are things you can do to improve it massively, even with a $20 brand-less drip machine from walmart: 1) Make sure your coffee maker is free of old, dry, rancid coffee or coffee oils, and not clogged with scale 2) Use really good water. 3) Grind your own coffee 4) Buy coffee you enjoy, which might be a national, name brand, cheap bag of beans, but there's significant flavor and style differences in these different brands! Try several different ones. Some lean acidic, some lean earthy and bitter, find your personal preference
Now we get to the "over fussy" stuff depending on how lucky you are 4) Use a concical bur grinder instead of a blade grinder for more consistent grind and extraction 5) Play with your coffee to water ratio. Everyone has different preferences here 6) Rinse the paper filter for your machine before use, or replace with a reusable mesh of some sort if you like your coffee more "sludgy" like cold brew or french press 7) "Pre heat" the water. Lots of drip machines don't heat the water very well in the beginning. My machine has a feature where if I keep the top open, the water recycles back into the tank so I can let it run and heat itself up. Alternatively heat up your water before brewing. 8) Let the grounds degass: remove the carafe or otherwise block the basket output, let hot water drip into the grounds until they are mostly submerged, and stop water from going into the basket. Let the grounds steep in the hot water for like a minute, then continue the brew as normal. I find this helps reduce acidity personally 9) Put a pinch of salt into the pot of coffee. Salt has a bitterness blocking effect that you might enjoy 10) check the output spout of your brewer into the basket. It can help to add some sort of "diffuse" so all the water doesn't just dig itself a hole into the grounds. When you go to empty the basket, it should look like a very even bed of grounds that got even water mostly all over
Check out James Hoffman on youtube for more information.
The real crime is most people make drip coffee too weak or with bad beans (or badly-ground beans).