Nothing personal against the communities, and sure, it’s an exercise on patience, but after some time, the results become noticeable as my feed gets fine-tuned into what I want to see.

Do you mean downvoting or blocking the communities? There is no feed fine-tuning based on downvotes on Lemmy, so you don’t see those communities in All after a while it means the community members just stopped posting altogether, not that it got hidden from you.