The user review system for games is the best I know of and arguably more useful in deciding what to buy than critic reviews.

Steam is also constantly promoting new games to you and making suggestions based on what you currently play. There is also the social aspect in that you can see who is playing what, leading to new discoveries.

Why does it seem like every review I read is basically a joke by someone with 1500 hours in a game saying simply "it's pretty good" or conversely someone with 2 hours in a game that writes an entire novel about how let down they were when they barely scratched the surface?

I will admit that at least having the verifiable length of time a reviewer played a game helps, but I don't find the reviews themselves to be all that worthwhile for most games.

Why does there even need to be a full review when someone has spent 1500 hours of their life playing it?

If it was worth 1500 hours of the reviewer's time then it's probably worth 10-50 of a potential buyer's.

Inversely, I don't need to play a bad game for 1500 hours to decide that it's bad. I played 60 minutes of No Man's Sky and you'd have to pay me to play a single one more. Does that mean I should be discredited from voicing my opinion?

I realized I was starting to rant about NMS, so instead I want to try to be more constructive about the problem-space and avoid that game as a topic.

The return system and the achievement system should probably be integrated. Likely there should be some sort of achievement related to 'escaping the tutorial'. They might even call it "Almost bought the farm" or something.

Playing to that point should give a player a good idea what kind of game it is, and what sort of plot (if any) is happening in the game.

From /that/ point they should have maybe 30-60 min of 'game runtime' to return the game or not.

Functionally this would be an in-product demo.

I actually miss demos, it's a shame they're a thing of the past, because they let you actually try the game before paying.

Steam could easily implement this, letting you try purchased games for up to two hours.

It's be trivial for them to implement some anti-abuse system (like "must have purchased N games before using demos, etc).

Once you've played a ton of video games you can easily judge most games by their game play aspects within 2 hours.

The exception would be with highly competitive multiplayer games, and even then you can quickly get a very good idea.

Someone said this on another forum and I disagree with them as I disagree with you. I've found plenty of games through Steam that I wouldn't have known about otherwise.

I also find games through Steam, but I do wish I found games through a different avenue. I've also had to promise myself that I'd strongly vet any early-access games I was buying. I've just been burned too many times.

This. Discovery is a rather unique activity that has a wholly different set of details / constraints / etc. Way more social and content driven. Every store & platform out there does its best to accommodate discovery (and sometimes succeeds), but this is secondary to things like maintenance/updates/cust svc, providing relevant product information, and managing transactions.

Steam isn't bad at discovery, but because they're not creating much original content and their UI is janky, they're also not that good at it.

Source: created comprehensive database of education technology products [1], and while we made best attempt at discovery, we learned pretty quickly it was secondary in importance to having comprehensive info.

[1] https://www.edsurge.com/product-reviews/

Why don't they let people offer curated lists, right in Steam?

They do - http://store.steampowered.com/curators/recommendedcurators/

They do, you just need to be the owner of a Steam Group. http://store.steampowered.com/curators/