I agree, a focus on efficiency, immediacy, and quantity has lead us to a barren experience of discovery. Music streaming certainly has its virtues, it is a shame that they haven't made the discovery process better.

I wonder what it would look like to have a feature that elicited reflection, perhaps purely for its own sake but maybe also to help feed further discovery. You could have a player that didn't immediately start playing the next track but presented an interface where you could write notes or react to the song in a variety of ways. That reflection could deepen your appreciation for the song or help you put into words what you find missing. It would also be a much richer feedback for the system to understand what you are looking for and find the next song. We now have all these fancy tools and vector databases for a nuanced and meaningful search based on text content.

What I find most tiring about the status quo is that you have to skip through a bunch of tracks to find something that resonates. It seems mentally taxing and I can't help but think I may actually like a lot of these songs if I was in the right frame of mind to hear them.