It's a shame Reddit's gotten such a bad rap and that it's so hard to find the quality subreddits.
Making quality contributions requires more effort. Having the front-page content as a "honeypot" of sorts weeds out those individuals who are primarily in the "drive-by" mode, anxious to blurt out emotional statements for immediate gratification.
The interesting thing, too, is that there is a necessary friction to maintaining high editorial quality. There must be conflict to be able to enforce "creme de la creme" level of content for consumption. Which is fine, and not personal. All of us have our thoughtful/contemplative mood and the rash impatient one. At least on a relative scale.
EDIT: That being said /r/pics recently put a rules system up that works tremendously well. It used to be meme-filled but now generally has great content (except for the MS paint trend popping up as of lately.)
I also find it odd that you're complaining about lack of thoughtful content but are happy to use terms like 'super lame'. Would you use it in your preferred politics thread: 'Too many of Obama's policies are super lame'? Sounds exactly like what you're complaining about.
No. That's what mass popularity is ALWAYS like.
What they need to do is create a better way to find sub-reddits you are interested in but which are not popular.
It's not that hard, just look for any subreddit that starts with or contains 'true', 'depth', or 'meta', among other keywords. Example: