the dev is not great at frontends.

Flow is critical. It might be worth finding some expert help in GUIs. We recently tried RetroShare which is IMO an ambitious GUI mess with lots of features but not organized well - as if they patched it all together from spare parts without intentional purpose.

My dream GUI and user preferences would have 16 modes: day/night + mobile/pc + 1) default-reset-plug'n'play, 2) basic beginner, 3) advanced, 4) expert.

I have never seen algorithms work well. Reddit just introduced an ai doing what you describe and its a nightmare.

I suspect that's because Reddit is trying to control things. I doubt the algorithm, the data, the analysis, and what they do with it is open source. If they just let it do it's thing then the results would speak for themselves and the "communities of commonalities" would reveal themselves like and insanely complex Venn diagram and users could write their own custom expressions and/or have GUI preferences to set up how they want to interface with their interests.

IMO the algorithm would be best kept as simple as possible and let the complexity unfold in the opinion votes, topical metatags, and other metadata - and how they are classified/interrelated.

Bubbles are unavoidable but by allowing the user to control it and not little dictating mods there is more hope that bubbles will pop or defuse.

Exactly!!!

Its why I am so gunho about discussions.app and their moderation or content management. In theory it should solve the problems of reddit.

Unfortunately none of this is apparent at first glance. It might be worth drafting up an outline and stuff on a wiki somewhere for lay-people, your target demographic. I'm guessing there's a GitHub thing but that's all Greek to me.