That's not true for the majority. Looks are the first signal you notice of the other person. Unless you are after poets, artists or other people whose work reach other people without "the looks" then I don't see how - even subconsciously - it's not important. Pics are furthermore do indicate personality.
I agree that Tinder is an industrial scale meat grinder, but the advantage is that wide exposure is better for your chances. It's like saying HI to a tons of people on the street you otherwise wouldn't meet.
The thing about Tinder that sucks is that you don't get a very good idea about a person from it, because all you get is a few pictures and if you're lucky, a very short free-form text session where hopefully they wrote something substantive about themselves.
However, the thing that makes Tinder great (and also Bumble, though I haven't tried that one yet) is that both parties must "like" each other for any messaging to occur. This still isn't the norm on "traditional" dating sites, for some reason. The traditional sites are bad for men, because they're encouraged to put forth a lot of effort to write meaningful messages to women, but almost all the effort is simply wasted because most of them go to women that have no interest in those men, and the man has no way of knowing this.
Tinder/Bumble fix this by forcing the woman to "like" a man's profile first, before he wastes any time and effort writing her a message. It also helps women by massively reducing the amount of unwanted messages they receive from men: if they get unwanted messages, it's partly their fault (and entirely under their control) for "liking" those men, and encourages them to be more selective with their right-swipes (so maybe they'll come up with some strategies for avoiding creeps, such as only right-swiping people with something meaningful written in their profile, and not just guys with gym selfies and backwards ball caps).
I think the problem with "not enough information" is that if people actually successfully progress from just using it to text each and count matches, you'll find that using just looks is extremely inefficient in actually finding quality matches. But seeing has how it's stereotypical for Tinder to be for hookups (even though most people I know use it for dating), it's probably justifiable for their intended use case.
Absolutely, for its intended use case (hookups), it's absolutely a far more efficient and utilitarian interface.
But for dating, I think it's pretty lousy. But as you said, most people (over the age of 30 I suspect) seem to use it for dating, not casual sex. And they're right to use it for that, because even though it's lousy IMO, it's where everyone is, and despite the rest of the UI being lousy for selecting quality matches IMO, the killer feature is the fact that both parties have to "like" each other. Why other dating sites like OKcupid don't adopt this, I have no idea, except maybe it's not good for their business model in their view. For women I've talked to, sites like OKC are just awful because they get so many unsolicited messages; this isn't much of a problem on Tinder and Bumble since they're in control.
Looks are the first thing you notice in a person, online, but not true in real life. In real life people meet based on mutual interests, serendipity, or simply having the balls to initiate convo. In those situations looks take a back seat.
People can adjust to looks given enough time, and their physical attractiveness to certain types are shaped by their positive interactions with a person. Apps like Tinder basically force looks to be at the forefront, despite all that.
That's not true for the majority. Looks are the first signal you notice of the other person. Unless you are after poets, artists or other people whose work reach other people without "the looks" then I don't see how - even subconsciously - it's not important. Pics are furthermore do indicate personality.
I agree that Tinder is an industrial scale meat grinder, but the advantage is that wide exposure is better for your chances. It's like saying HI to a tons of people on the street you otherwise wouldn't meet.