As a new, excited, user on steemit - I found this because I was trying to figure out how to follow topics I care about, just like I do on Reddit.

I'm very surprised and disappointed that this isn't possible.

Everything you've said I agree with, I'm not going to try and find all of the individual authors (including those who don't yet have accounts!) to curate my list of content.

While the bot idea from @dennygalindo is somewhat viable (someone would still have to maintain the list of users that it posts links from, and ensure the bot remains functioning), it is not an ideal solution because it's a hack around what the platform allows vs. just having the core functionality present in steemit itself.