i was a bit underwhelmed at first with all the adverts, but after you've put a lot of time and training into it (and i really do mean a lot!) then it's actually not too bad and i use it pretty much every day now.
my tips: in order to get it to show just the stories you like then you need to block all the apple curated stuff like 'apple news spotlight', 'apple news today' and 'apple news top stories'. and don't follow any channels whatsoever -- that's how most of the stories you don't want get through. just concentrate on the topics, liking all the variations of the topics you like, and blocking all the variations of the topics you don't like.
it's not enough to just block the entire topic of 'football', for example, you need to block everything from 'manchester utd' and 'premier league' to 'fa cup' and 'world cup' and all the other bazillions of similar topics
and likewise, if you want stories about UK politics then you have to like all the different variations from 'uk politics' and 'uk government' to 'uk parliament', 'prime minister of the UK', 'UK house of commons', 'member of parliament of the UK' and as many similar topics you can think of.
and eventually, after a few weeks (and a lot of patience), it will just show lots of stories that you do want