I have tried many suggestions I got as well, but none of them work for me at all with my current set up.
A lot of times I actually use the search to find new things - I just search without any keyword at all and use filters to specify. Sometimes I want to see what the streaming service I am currently using has in its portfolio. So I use an empty search, use the filters and can easly find out, what content they provide, what is on my watchlist and what isn’t. I never use recommendations from trakt, so I never hide things in the first place, and in searches there is no hide button.
If I would put all items I will never ever watch in a list (which would be pretty long I think), then those things would come up again if I filter “in list/not in list”. Having things in my list I don’t want to watch would make that filter useless - unless I could filter by specific lists, like my watchlist. If I could filter by specific lists in search, I could easily create “never watch” lists, put everything on there and then filter it out.
What annoys me the most are popular titles I am just not interested in showing up every time I use the empty search. I get that search is not supposed to be used that way, but I like that it’s possible and it’s one of the best features of trakt for me personally. Because I don’t have to know what I want and I don’t have to rely on computer-made recommendations of just the most popular titles, I can actually find hidden gems just by scrolling through the pages in an empty search - if I can bear to ignore all the titles I am looking at for the 1000000 time and still never will watch.
Side-note: depending on how things like “dropped” are used for the whole community, I wouldn’t want to complicate the analytics. On Simkl I use “dropped” to filter out things I never will watch, since I can specifically exclude those titles in search etc. But of course my “dropped” is used to show other users that I am one of the 10% of people who didn’t continue that show - although I never tried it in the first place and have no interest in ever doing so which would make the word “dropped” wrong in the first place 