I thought the 'hot' ranking was a mixture of votes and comment engagement?
I do feel like there needs to be some further tweaking, controversial should have a time falloff so it shows recent controversy instead of something 6 months old for example.
There needs to be a choice. The fact that Reddit/Lemmy allow you to build and control what content you see is the best bit about them.
If you just show by new, then communities with lots of posts drown out smaller ones; low effort posts drown out ones that took a while to create. It also discourages engagement as the posts old enough to have good conversations will be a long way down the page.