Excellent article @donkeypong! Thank you! We have been talking much about curation lately and few about content. A classic chicken-egg-error. Because before wondering about how to perfectly allocate votes and get rewarded for them, we should make sure there is good and nicely structured content on which to vote.
I am totally with you: for new users it's very hard to find a way through the jungle. You say that we have unwritten rules. Why don't write them down? And why don't limit tags to a maximum of 2? At least for some time to see if things would get better. No matter what your story is about I bet you will be able to perfectly tag it with two trendy key-words.
I also totally agree on the structure problem. It would be awesome to have a sort function. Like this the system wouldn't be defining a universal structure for everyone but offering an individual structuring tool.
Moderation is good but will require a lot of resources. I am not sure if we could provide them at this point of time. And a network which aims to become a mass medium in the future should have an excellent and easy to understand usability in any case. If we needed people to guide the traffic the system wouldn't be able to handle masses.