> "That's the price for..." implies that this is constant across alternatives, but it's not

Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.

> Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.

hmmm you're right... Reddit's sub-reddit's is imo a half-assed implementation of an idea tribe paper that showed up years ago on HN. To this day I can't find it.

Anyways the gist of the idea, is that everyone belongs to an idea tribe / group aimed that making wikipedia better. All of these groups have differences in what they think are accurate, right, cool, etc... However many groups have things that they agree on. The paper talks about how great it would be if we could have something that would highlight those commonalities.