Thanks for sharing your 2cents.
Tags can be nice but are also abused.
I am a bit reluctant to follow more communities because that could 'mess up' my community feed.
And 'newbies' might not have found the niche communities we're following. I still see quite some cycling blog not being posted in my Cycling Community. Either because the user doesn't know of the existence or the blog has multiple subjects, for instance a a cycling holiday post in the Worldmappin community.
And I could check the #cycling tah, but then I might want to filter out the #actifit posts (This is just an example to show a use case of the curation tool by the way).