I genuinely don't understand this, but are they all operating from the same NIP? Whatever one is for "Reddit-like moderated communities"?

I agree, this is something that should work better. I just see it as an issue of user base. As small as Nostr is, ~15k daily users, that's just for the "Twitter-like" part of Nostr. Take another 1 or 2 percent for the "Reddit-like" part and it gets even smaller.

But I guess that's all the more argument to get the technical architecture right before crowds show up...