Extracting this from your comment, @ph1102:
"The thing that I would like to see, and it shouldn't be complicated to implement, is better filtering of posts on frontends... Trending posts are usually those that are heavily supported by whale accounts and do not represent the content that is "most read"...
Would I be correct with my understanding this could be done at any time? Since it would not require a hard fork to the underlying blockchain code itself?
Either way, I would love to see this implemented. I am biased, of course, by my experience as a new contributor of content. That said, anyone with any common sense can see this aspect of participating as one more challenge to overcome.
Why is it still in place, after the passage of so much time? It does not matter what I think the answer might be. Whatever it is, it will be up to others to decide whether it warrants consideration for being fixed.
I suppose it would need the collecting of metrics from different frontends, which shouldn't be more complicated than changing the HIVE code...
I suppose as it was the easiest to implement... As you have all the data on the chain, just pull out the data and sort by upvotes values...