There was an article posted about a week ago about MS cleaning house in the store. You can probably find it if you search the site for "Microsoft, scam, store"
What makes these scam apps? The fact there are 976 of them? Go check out the other OS stores... Apple probably has 200 categories/subcategories in their App store. With their boasted 1 million apps, that puts an average of 5,000 in each subcategory. I'm sure there's a bit of wastebin fodder there.
As for finding the good stuff in the WP store, apps with more and higher ratings are posted at the top of the list. This is unlike the Apple and Google stores where apps with the most downloads (they don't track subsequent uninstalls) get listed at the top.
You can provide feedback to Microsoft here:
Feature Suggestions: Marketplace (1204 ideas) – Feature Suggestions for Windows Phone
Suggestions with more votes get more attention, so you might search for a previously posted item that agrees with you, vote for it, and add your comment.