Welcome to the steem blockchain, @abwalls! It is great to see new blood, as yourself, joining the community.
I would love to here other users ideas ...
There is one project which occured to me today which could help get some grateful notoriety in the community.
A few days ago the Hivemind release has reached witness approval. It is a great resource saver by removing such non-essencial blockchain data such as the follows and tags listings out of RAM and onto disk. This has resulted in huge resource savings yet has meant that the followers/following lists are no longer alphabetically listed but are displayed in a 'last in' to 'first in' display as they are pulled from the blockchain on a time line bases.
If you have a handle on browser add-ons, then you may be able to give users back alphabetical listings by using the Tower API which is further explained in the link below.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@emrebeyler/tower-a-rest-api-implementation-on-the-top-of-hivemind
Regardless on which project you decide upon it will be followed, by me, with interest. Delegating you some SPs until you get on your feet.
STEEM On!!!