Territories can be made by anyone at anytime on any topic. For one month, a territory costs 50k sats and the founder gets to set the posting and commenting fees and receives a split of the zaps to content in that territory. There are something like eight profitable territories right now. The bottom of the site has a link to the analytics page, which has a bunch of graphs on various metrics.

You make a good point about quality posts vs what's currently valued. My experience is that thoughtful posts about almost anything can receive a decent quantity of zaps. The community isn't all that monolithic, other than being bitcoin maxis.