Hi! totally understandable with search. I think we went with search because, for the user base, they usually have a specific topic or database in mind. For people who don't know to search for, we have the category sections below Absolutely we need a better null-search state! (I'd do nearest-match and topic pages, but one release at a time. And CRAZY to only do search at 10k items! i mean, i do love opinionated design... but don't you find it hard to browse so many items?

Density - i am often against highly dense pages cus, for me, scan-ability and legibility are the most important. Big text and just a couple items for page seem to fit the bill. But i usually go denser on search-result-pages or dataset pages since it's more of a comparison step.

I wish we had more visualizations and stories to put front and center. Believe me, they quickly become super contentious! But that is the vision...