-You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc.

There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___"

I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008. Then, sadly, a few weeks ago, they were all back one day out of the blue. Since then, the unsubscribe functionality has been straight-up broken.

https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268