I frequently learn of useful apps through its updated/new section that you see when opening the app. Back in the day when it didn't have this I used to scroll through all the categories - the catalogue was small enough to do this.

I wish the updated/new section would filter "update spam" better, but right now it works for app discovery, without requiring f-droid to collect usage data. The search function sorting by "recently updated" also helped a lot in finding well supported apps.

There's a lot of room for improvement of the search function though.