It will seem less weird if you understand the purpose of HN [1] and how it is optimized [2]. The idea here is to gratify intellectual curiosity. That's not the same as repeating the things that need the most attention; to some extent it's the opposite, because curiosity withers under repetition [3]. What curiosity likes is to encounter things it
hasn't heard before; it's fine if there is an overlap with a familiar topic, as long as there's some interesting diff. Diffs are what make submissions intellectually interesting [4].
People sometimes feel that if a story doesn't make HN's front page or gets downweighted or flagged from HN's front page, that's because moderators or the community are saying it is unimportant. This is not true at all. Many topics are far more important than anything on HN. An odd, obscure topic is more likely to be on topic than a world crisis. There was just a thread about John Cage's mushroom hobby [5], of all things.
This leads to a somewhat complex dynamic because having an interesting site attracts a high-quality audience, and people then want to use the site to get stories they care about in front of that audience. Sometimes their motives are merely commercial, but sometimes it's because the story is big and important and they're passionate about it. It's easy to declare the commercials off topic, but when it comes to the important stories, that's when we need to remember what HN is. Maintaining an odd sort of site that goes against the default forces of the internet takes a lot of focus and you have to say 'no' a lot. If we start breaking the intended purpose, HN would quickly cease to be the kind of forum it is today—it would become a site for the same few important and/or most controversial stories, repeated over and over. Not only would that make HN totally different, it would probably kill it, because such a situation would be unstable: the current audience would largely leave, because HN would no longer have the quality that attracted them here in the first place. No one is claiming that intellectual curiosity is the most important quality or motive—but it's uniquely what this place is for, and one has to know what one is trying to achieve and what one is not trying to achieve.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27481830