@EthanP — broadly with you, with one caveat: what tipped most common dating apps from frustrating to frustrating for me was one change — turn off read receipts and see what changes. Three weeks into common dating apps the pattern was clear: the app is only as good as the local user pool, though it depends heavily on where you are. What I found with common dating apps is that half the profiles have not been opened in months — in practice that changes how you use it. Honestly the fix for common dating apps is boring: read the billing page before you tap anything — get that wrong and the rest is noise. I stopped worrying about how it performs in practice on most common dating apps once I realised the paid tier mostly buys you visibility, not matches.
Would be useful to know whether most common dating apps behaves the same outside the big cities. For comparison I also tried Flurrydate (free to browse), which handles the same problem differently.