Two related changes were made during the 3.15.x cycle:

 * Installed applications are now excluded from the "Editor's Picks" and "Recommended" sections on the home page.

 * The manually maintained whitelist of recommended applications is now supplemented with apps, following some automatic logic.

Issues with this:

 1. Since installed apps are not shown, whole sections of recommended apps can go missing from the home page. This results in the home page being less populated than usual, and the layout of the page becomes unpredictable and inconsistent.

 2. Poor quality applications are being recommended. For instance, today I saw a screenshot [1] that included as our "Recommended Graphics Applications": Dia, gImageReader, nip2, Darktable, gImageReader, and Nomacs. These certainly aren't the best quality graphics apps we have to offer.

 3. Each application category includes a "Featured" view, which is populated with the whitelist. Since these views do not include the automatically generated recommendations, they are now inconsistent with the recommended sections what we show on the home page.

 4. The automatic generation of recommended apps seems error-prone. Today we had a report about MATE apps showing up, and while that particular issue has been fixed, it wouldn't surprise me if other false positives arise in the future. Yet another maintenance burden has been created.

While I can understand the logic behind hiding installed apps, it is actually more harmful than positive. It is far worse to have "recommended" sections filled with poor quality apps, than it is to show apps that have already been installed. It devalues the platform, by making it look like we don't have any good apps.

I can't stress how important it is that our recommendations actually include the best applications available. This is one of the primary reasons for Software to exist in the first place.

[1] https://kalev.fedorapeople.org/gnome-software-category-of-the-day.png