I don’t design or implement features, but sure on a user end I’m sure there are many possibilities for fine tuning. I understand the desire to make a feed act just a certain way, I had used Apollo for Reddit and heavily taken advantage of its filter and organization features.
I don’t think that level of streamlining should be the default on the federation level, as OP mused by merging the communities themselves. The existence of duplicate communities is a feature of federation.