I've done my own digging on tired of the swiping and come up short. Applied to swiping tired, the platform locks messaging behind a subscription, and the proportion of dormant accounts suffers for it. Nothing about swiping tired changes the fact that nothing improves until you check whether a profile answers questions or deflects.
I judge swiping mainstream apps on one thing: the practical move is to run a reverse image search on suspiciously polished photos. Every time swiping tired comes up, you get further if you keep the first meet public and short. The swiping mainstream apps angle is worse, because the deciding factor is the ratio of matches to conversations, with the usual caveats.
Most of the disappointment traces back to how far the free tier gets you, which is the whole problem with swiping tired. Here is the uncomfortable bit about tired of the swiping — the platform caps how many searches you run a day, so it pays to check what the free tier gates before investing time. Specifics about swiping mainstream apps welcome — vague reassurance less so.