You guys are missing the point. Sure, he has a vision and he doesn't want to abandon it but in order to compete in ranking for super high competitive terms his site has to be on par with the other top ranking sites. Google doesn't know what his intent is and as the site is right now, the algo compares what he has to what others have. He has great backlinks, but really sub par content when you look at who he is competing against. He does not seem like an authority on any of this stuff.

If the concept is to attract the 'satisficers' which by the way, i love that word and that book also, there needs to be some other kind of optimization on the pages. Going after 'best of' for everything looks spammy. And that spammyness is amplified by the lack of content when compared to the other sites ranking for the terms he's optimizing for.

There are other ways to attack this problem. Instead of having it be best of everything - it really should be a statistics site for popular products. Add in some kind of ranking system or some kind of kayak-like search and BOOM - new unique concept that provides real value to people. As the site is right now, its gimmicky, thin on content and is NOT going to rank in today's SERPs the way it is now. Sorry.