I would suggest that one of the reasons you find the submissions on the New page valuable is that submitters are actively seeking out stories they think the HN community would upvote. So the content of the New page indirectly reflects popularity within the HN community.
Not really. There's a hell of a lot of wading through junk, when you browse HN by "New". So much so that I maintain a special uBlock filter list to weed out a lot of crappy domains and keywords.
That's one advantage of browsing by the default frontpage: your fellow HNers have pre-filtered what ends up there, for you. It's also the disadvantage.
