Even worse, many (most?) writers are pretty bad at this too. Writing summaries has become one of my main jobs over the past couple of years and it's still pretty tough with a lot of source material where a full read and comprehension is required.

Algorithms currently suck as 'one size fits all' approaches for almost anything, including curation and summarizing, but.. it's an interesting and narrow enough problem space that some genuine AI or natural language processing innovations could come out of it, so as you say, it'd be great to see it come good.