I suspect part of it is that they've had to scrounge for reccers lately; a lot of us primarily find stories through the comm in the first place (or, if they're like me, can not figure out how to tell clearly if something's already been recced in a category), so the coverage has been thin, and I think a lot of folk have been volunteering out of a sense of obligation rather than motivation. They don't necessarily have that list of stuff they've been waiting forever to rec; they go grab ones to meet their minimum when they notice it's getting late.

I think if I had a backlog to rec and volunteered, I'd try to do one the same day each week, which I'm guessing is the theory behind four per month anyway.

I'm personally accustomed to skimming down my flist because it's also my RSS reader (when the feeds aren't down, again), so the clumps don't especially bother me; I can just ignore a chunk of Sheppard/Weir recs, for example, instead of being excited that I have a new distraction from work on my flist and then realizing I don't care about it. That's almost definitely just me, though. Heh. And I throw a new tab from anything I plan to look into, so I don't tend to miss recs that interest me.