The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! In fact right now I'm working on a new "Discover" screen that will allow filtering by publisher and topic. We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.
> With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.
It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it so the real garbage usually doesn't float up since people chose to abandon those articles. Again, not perfect by any means but it is something to consider if an article is more than a few minutes long and has a lot of reads on it.
> Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least?
Yes! When the AOTD email goes out (midnight PST every night) it includes the "description" metadata provided by the publisher if present (seems to be available about 90% of the time). We should definitely show that in the UI on the web app too for the AOTD at least (and maybe have some expandable toggle to show it for other articles).
