My experience goes against this position.

Between quite a few really active users and the ability to follow hashtags I have had a very active timeline almost since day 1 in Mastodon.

To put it in comparison, I find it hard to keep up with the Masto timeline while my 6-hour best sorting starts quickly showing a ton of doubles (wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow make them go away? )

What is it that you mean by that? Do you mind rephrasing your reply?

But still, anyone coming from Reddit is going to 100% say it feels shoddy.

What makes you say that?