I am on the fence on this. I think it's a huge change that creates communities and would probably require bringing followed tags back. But, at the same time I would love to throw all the hubski, reddit, suggestions, bugs, etc into a separate feed and have just my articles and interesting posts on another. I want to stay updated on all this shit, but when I woke up this morning I just wanted to read interesting things. Perhaps in the way future there would be a way to have a way to filter your page and turn on/off certain tags or groups or something.
I think days like the one you're having today are what I had in mind when I suggested the 'hide' feature - if you normally like seeing those types of posts, but really just don't feel like it today, it's not too hard to click 'hide' a few times until your feed looks the way you like it. Actually, what I suggested above wouldn't really be able to accomplish what you had in mind - I would be following different people in my personal hubs, not different topics. Therefore, I could group certain types of submitters together, but there would always be random things in every hub, because, well, people submit a lot of different things even if they mostly submit from a small pool of related tags. For example, I would follow users who are most likely to submit articles about science & technology in one hub, users who submit mostly images in another hub, and users who mostly joke around / submit funny things in a third hub. It would be nice to have a meta news/suggestions hub, but I don't know how you could do that without bringing back the ability to follow tags, like you said.