I disagree that all of Lemmy needs to pick a direction. That’s the nice thing about instances. You can spin up your own and do what you want on there.
I think a lot of this would be resolved by more features. Instance blocking on user side should be a thing, for example. I think some app does it, but it’s not a feature of the whole platform. Also, if there was a way to automatically link multiple communities of the same topic from different instances, I think it would cut down on a lot of the repetitive content we see on All. But that would have to be a feature you can toggle, otherwise I can imagine it breaking horribly.