So we want to interact with new people, but obviously not all new people. There are a lot of new people that make it hard for one to talk to new people one wants to talk about.

I guess that even my suggestion that the most upvoted or starred, trusting the community to promote a user who makes a new comment, elevating him/her from the rest of the users, isn't good enough with my idea of separation of account ages. Well, it was an admittedly naive suggestion spurred on by:

#askhubski is a miasma of tedium, whereas last year, it wasn't.

So then my brain clicked with the age separation idea. In any case.

Here:

and when they outnumber you ten to one, the community stops attracting interesting new people.

Personally I'm inclined to believe that, unless "new" is meant in "familiarity" and not "new user", those interesting people are still going to big places, but are just drowned out. Coming up with a way to undrown them is perhaps something too complicated for me, but I gave it a shot for whatever it's worth. I'm interested in hearing why you think they wouldn't be attracted to coming to a place with users like that. I can hazard a guess and say it has to do with what you've already said on reddit trilogy, and then the question changes to something more structural and probably out of my league.