There is a lot of value in good curation but its also extremely time consuming to curate well. Its very difficult to do it as a group activity especially a highly disconnected one via git/opensource and where a lot of these lists started out good the collective effort has ruined their value.
I think we need curation more than ever on the internet on a range of topics where social media of various forms don't work very well. I also think there is a real place for index's as well because search often does adjacency quite poorly since its not really optimised for that. Short curated lists are great for beginning, long ones not so much to anyone.