That said, I don’t really need a smarter algorithm than “show my tweets with a lot of favorites”.
Just like a prefer to have Reddit sort by best vs new.
A rather meta example: scroll down to the "More Tweets" section under this recent Elon Musk tweet - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525738556102164480
I don't know what it might curate for each person reading this, but I'll bet you'll see what I'm talking about.
I don't follow every player, coach, or organization and it's common for me to see 1 tweet from one of my follows and the More Tweets to contain content I want to consume from the 1000's of others talking about this specific scene.
I'd also recommend not using the More Tweets feature for anything too popular as it's like reading a youtube comments section.
I think the algorithmic feed actually does a good job of promoting the things Twitter does well and I wonder how many people who hate it actually just disagree with the Twitter devs about how the service should work.
In my case, the algo is pretty good at surfacing useful tweets and people: both new stuff that I find relevant, and tweets from the people I'm following that I missed.
So I generally use lists to interact with different groups of people I'm already interested (including the ones I'm following) and the homepage is great for discovery.
There was a period of time when Twitter was testing an interface that had the two feeds on tabs and it kept reverting back to the algorithmic tab. I almost quit.