You misunderstand what the Hot rank is doing. It's not balancing newness vs hotness, it's scaling hotness according to community size. This might feel like newness if you're focused on vote counts as a proxy for post age, but it's a different approach. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622 for details.
There's a couple ways to think about this:
- There are a handful of Lemmy communities that are just WAY more active than everything else. The main feeds are kind of lame if you have to scroll 300 posts it to find anything other than a shit post from the same 3 communities. Scaled Hot rank shows a greater variety of communities by making it easier small communities to get ranked hotly.
- Or you can consider Hotness to be a rough measure of what percentage of people who have seen the post interacted with it. A post with 500 upvotes in a community with 10,000 active users is kind of popular, but only 5% of the people likely to have scrolled passed it cared about it. A post with 50 upvotes in a community with 200 active members is much MORE popular relatively even though the absolute numbers are smaller.
At any rate, this preference toward smaller communities in hot is a recent change and deliberate. While they might further tweak the scaling factors, I wouldn't expect it to be drastically different. It sounds to me like what you want is Top, Active, or Most Comments. All these are unscaled according to community size and will get you top posts by their absolute metric rather than posts that are doing well relative to their community size.