It seems to me that most of the issues are caused by too few ideal HNers watching the "New" page and up-voting quality content. Instead, primarily controversial

It seems to me that most of the issues are caused by too few ideal HNers watching the "New" page and up-voting quality content. Instead, primarily controversial submissions manage to garner the necessary number of up-votes to make it to the front page before falling off of the "New" page. I don't believe that the proposed honeypot solution would address this.