... best App Store curator will probably be Google. ...
Google is itself a massively gamed platform. SEO is a thing, as is monetization of search placement and search results.
Yeah I'm not a dummy. You have to be a savvy consumer. It's not like I'm searching Google for a type of app, then click on a link for an app its self. I understand that's how it works. Instead I look for articles ABOUT the kind of apps I'm looking for. I also end up adjusting to search for results from the past year at first and then shrink the timeframe down from that so that I'm not getting information on apps written for iOS 8 or something. I look for multiple articles to get a consensus. I compare that with sources I trust. I ask you folks and add that into the math.
But Google is still where I start because you have to start somewhere. There's ways to game all the algorithms, so I choose to work within that system.