It seems a common complaint seen in these posts is that legitimate sites, in most cases "mom and pop" operations, working hard to produce quality content are now outranked by crap sites that have gamed the system by stealing other people's content and probably every other black hat method to fool google into giving them high rankings.
If this is the case, then guess what Google, your algorithm really screwed up!
If you really care about quality content, then you need to support the people who produce it  if it means visual inspection of web sites then you need to do it.  Ultimately that is the only way to rate a site.