Agreed. Tagging isn't about prettiness, it's about being able to find stuff later. Also, some of the prettiness is because of tag limitations of LiveDead To Me Unreliable Journal (where we can no longer find anything at all), and this new place uses essentially the same software base.
Experimenting early is easier than cleaning up later, given the volume and diversity of posts.
Think of arriving on scans_daily 1.0 and seeing a post featuring an author or penciller or character you've never experienced before, but who catches your attention in that one post captivates you so much you want to find out MOAR. Good tagging at scans_daily 1.0 was easier, faster, and generally more useful than wikipedia or google. Bad tagging was frustrating.
Finally, tags like nsfw (nudity, porn, gay, ...) were not just warnings for people in some contexts or mindsets, they were ways of finding the good stuff for people in diametrically opposite contexts or mindsets. Warnings can be restated before the cut; stuff before the cut is less than very searchable. :-(