How much of "page one", ie. the top ranked stories, is made up of stories from those two pools?
I feel good when a re-upped post or an invited repost makes #1, like Yayagram did yesterday, and Internal Combustion Engine has now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26991300), because that's such a strong indicator of the community finding a story interesting.
Is it just that the ratio of submitted stories to people browsing new is too high, causing a low chance of any particular story to be looked at? If I had novel ideas on improving this I'd write it out, but I think others have already suggested things like randomly mixing new stories into the hot pages.