Speaking solely for myself, your description of me, someone seeking smarter people than myself and mostly chiming in on political/business things, it is insightful and spot on. I don't contribute much, if any, to highly technical discussions, nor do I demonstrate my own expertise. I do have it (technical expertise), but I rarely see relevant times to bring it up, and when I do see those times it's usually better to stay silent or somebody else has already said what I wanted to better than I could.
So I contribute more (not much; I resisted creating an account for many years, and now try to limit myself) to the generalized topics we can all share interest in. If stories on those topics weren't there, I wouldn't say anything. In fact, I could get those exact same stories elsewhere with accompanying forum. The only reason I prefer it here is because of the smarter people.
Will that make HN more like reddit or <insert normie platform>? Yeah, probably, and maybe that's not great.
In other words I'm near the epitome of the strawman you created, and I agree with you. I'll consider if my own participation can be modified to alleviate our shared concerns.