I don't really think this would have helped much, but I do think that it highlights a part of why G+ has not been a very big success. It just lacks a compelling use case to make you come back to it after you discover that it doesn't have Facebook's network effect. There's nothing it does that Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook don't do better, aside from look kind of googly and force you to pick which one of your 5 gmail/apps account identities you want to really use.
If I had been able to selectively subscribe to technical content of posters rather than also hearing about their cats, there is no reason I would not be using it over Twitter and Facebook to catch up on people's microblogging/thoughts.
I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument.
Well, that's kind of exactly my point. Facebook does the "things happening in my friends' lives that are largely inane but relevant to me" thing far better than some give it credit for (going to great lengths to determine relevance based on real actions you take). Twitter does the "I want a mind dump of the people I admire from afar with no filters" thing much better.
If Circles were the other way around -- a way to organize and categorize your thoughts for better consumption of other people -- I think that would have been better, and more along the lines of what you're talking about. If it had done it somewhat automatically that might have been even better.
But one thing that always kept me unhappy with G+ was that managing my circles felt like painful busywork better left to a computer, and it was only for my own benefit. It feels like work to control who gets to see what, and it's amortized on the wrong end, so I never did it. I don't know that anyone really does.
At any rate, no one's arguing people use facebook because of the people they don't want to hear from. That would be ludicrous.
