The thing is, I have the choice between following too few people to get enough of the stuff that really interests me, or having a deluge that I can't possibly get through, where most of it is not of interest to me, because of what the people I'm interested in seeing certain stuff from posts is stuff I'm not interested in.

Without a ranked/AI-managed feed I'm not truly in control of my feed - without it, I'm forced to curate who I follow based on different criteria to what I want.

> Without a ranked/AI-managed feed I'm not truly in control of my feed

It sounds to me like you are describing the opposite: being more in control than you would like.

It's a matter of perspective. In order to follow people I want to follow because I want to see a small subset of what they post, I also end up getting a boatload of crap in my feed I don't want to see. As such you can say I'm "in control" in as much as I did choose to follow them. But I'm also not in control in as much as I lack the tools to prune down what I see from them to the content I actually want to see.

The latter point of view is the one that is actually useful to me, and so the one I choose to take: I want to be able to see limit subsets of content from people that they label poorly (so following tags is insufficient) and without having to see everything else they post.

I'm perfectly fine with people preferring chronological too - the two can coexist. It doesn't even require any changes to Mastodon to do what I want; just a tiny ActivityPub server that processes my timeline and emits boosts to an outbox that I can put in a list is sufficient.