So far hot has worked pretty well for me. Haven't really ran into the issues you mentioned with posts not having that many interactions near the top of hot, unless it's from a smaller community. My main problem I've had is when opening Lemmy after a bit or refreshing I'll get the same posts over again even if they're marked as read which is annoying and usually means I end up sorting by new. Would be nice if there was an option to hide already read posts. (Or if there already is one I'd be very interested in knowing where it is, also I use Jerboa mainly on Android so not sure if that changes anything either.)