I'm new to Nostr as well, and I agree with your assessment of the onboarding. I'm going to stick it out a bit and see how it goes though, I'm hoping the selection bias of a federated, decentralized, permisionless system will lead to higher quality content once I get into it well.
Discussion
I found three useful tricks. 1) was to use some of the algorithms ("DVMs") which gives you popular and trending notes. You can use these as your main feed or follow people from there. 2) was follow hashtags, 3) was fine some more curated relays, such as Nostr wine or web of trust ("WOT ") relays and read the "global" view there.
Lots of power here, lots of good content, but yet to become user friendly!
I was unaware of curated relays. This sounds like it could be an avenue that could be expanded on.
The global view has far too much junk to sift through.
Oh for sure, public relays global is junk. Curated relays are great.
I am also this morning playing around with lists. Some people have defined great user lists that create great feeds. E.g. here's one of top Nostr devs.
Oh, and this. There is a brand new thing called an algo relay, some clients support them already. Check this out (note it only works if you're logged in): https://jumble.social/?r=wss://algo.utxo.one/