For me the feeds solve a lot of problems with straight hashtags, like getting stuff that's the wrong language, or bot spam. But I guess if you are just going for visual stuff that stuff may be easier to tolerate.
If you don't like the feeds that are out there already, you can build your own feed. https://www.southernfriedscience.com/a-quick-and-dirty-guide-to-making-custom-feeds-on-bluesky/
You can build a feed just from straight hashtags if you want, but I think combining it with crowdsourced tags, block lists, and keywords will get you better results.