That's not what I am talking about though. Topics work with the recently introduced "tags" that you can add to your repo's description.
No one or few people self-reference their repo with something as broad as "systems engineering" or "systems programming".
The closest thing that exist on Github is the explore tab which lets you browse random repos by categories (e.g open government). Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-discovery, namely: interest maps, automatically infer a repo's category based on its content, description and the profiles that star or fork it, for starters. They can even make their search engine relevant and pleasant to use if they feel like treating us.
And I'd want that to be integrated in my feed. Right now, I follow around 150 active users and it is still pretty sparse: it's not uncommon for me to see "X started Y 2 days ago". It would be good to add more (good) signal.
I want to see more of what better programmers are starring.
You're telling me that a feature exists which technically fits my request. Cool
I tell you it only does so nominally. I didn't fully develop its specs but you could have inferred that they weren't matching the existing one's. The topic feature is half-baked, poorly thought-out and integrated.
What you're talking about already exists. In fact, they're called topics, e.g.: https://github.com/topics/systems-engineering