> Zero people wake up in the morning thinking "I'll just browse for new papers from people I've never heard of."
Minor comment, but that's fairly dependent on the field. Every morning I am at work I take ~5–10 minutes to skim the titles of the day's new arXiv/astro-ph postings[0] to see if there's anything interesting. If there is, I'll mark it for later, save it, or spend some time reading/skimming it. That's fairly common among my peers in the field. There are even websites that piggyback on arXiv to facilitate voting on papers to create agendas for discussion groups or journal clubs[e.g., 1].