If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.

I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.