Ugh! Can I say I am Right There With You? Well, I haven't really looked at trimming anything off the flist yet, but I've thought about it, and I have such a hard time finding fics. I read mostly on IJ right now because my work filters LJ. I keep a couple of those report/link compilers on my flist, and that's nice but like you said, I don't even want to click on the semi-promising ones most of the times.

But I feel like something's missing, like there's an opportunity here, and I think you nailed it - someplace where there are more than 5 people posting, where things are well-written, where they don't live and die by ships (or the Epilogue, or, y'know, canon, and yet anything really AU should still have recognizable *characters, at least), and where the summaries and good and word lengths are known ahead of time.

It almost makes me want to start a new rec list (ha) >_>