No, all free relays are like that.

Either follow more people and don’t use universe, or search for hashtags.

Alternatively you could pay for a paid relay but that would limit your ability to be discovered. Unfortunately damus doesn’t allow us to filter universe to a specific relay yet.

Yes. Try toggling off relay.damus.io from Universal feed only.. If you're using paid relays, you can add those. Otherwise nostr.band & nos.lol itself should give you a less spammy but usable feed.