One of the biggest problems in the App Store is discoverability. The only options are to search for specific keywords or to browse one of the few lists offered by Apple. User-created lists add a bit of human perspective on the problem of finding related items. For example, on YouTube I consider lists as being very important for navigation.
What do you mean by this?
> no ability to filter based on more than their two or three meaningless filters, etc
What kinds of things would you want to filter on? (Not disagreeing, just honestly curious.)