I don't want to have to wade through all the projects to get to some quality stuff. I want a convenient way to access things people you like make. I want.... a follow system.
Yeah, we'll get to it.
Can you make it so that following people allows you to see what they've been doing, but it's impossible to see who other people are following or how many followers someone has?
I agree with you. Follower count should not be something visible. 
I think follow count should be visible to the owner of the account, and if they wish to share, they may. Like in Tumblr.
the problem is that when someone gets, like, 300 followers, they'll tell everyone about it like on scratch.
I think it should say 'support' if the button were to be added
I'd be more inclined to support a follow feature in which nobody knows how many followers someone has, not even the followee. All following would do is affect your feed.
But none of this will happen until our team recovers from Snap!Con and gets teacher support under control. I know we've been waiting for that for a long time, but everyone is busy. We're trying our best.
Actually, I think you should be able to see who someone is following. But you can't see how many people are following you.
Why?
I think you should be able to see how many folowers you have
Why?
Sorry to be difficult, but often people's reasons for wanting things a certain way boil down to "because that's how Scratch does it." We do pay attention to how Scratch does things, and when we do things differently we usually have a specific reason for it. In this case, we think that it's a serious weakness in the (generally wonderful!) Scratch community that it incentivizes things like follow-swapping and it makes for winners and losers.
The benefit to following in the first place is that if you like someone's work you find out about their new projects. That benefit doesn't require telling the person being followed anything at all.
By the way, welcome to the forum!
Because it allows you to see who someone is interested in
"Support" wouldn't be that great. I would suggest "subscribe" so you can get notifications if that snap user shares any projects
But, people could just tell you the amount of followers you have
People can say "I'm following you" and I guess you could add those up to get a lower bound.
Look, we have certain ideas about what constitutes a healthy environment for our users. We are going to try not to sabotage ourselves in what we build into the environment. We know perfectly well that you don't live your entire lives on this site. We also know it's arrogant for a bunch of adults you don't even know to try to make decisions about your lives, but not making a decision is just a different decision, and not a very good one, I think.
But there's a big difference between not building bad features into the environment and spending all our time trying to police it. If you guys really want a popularity contest you'll find a way. The best we can do is try to build an environment in which the things you're meant to do are engaging, and make it as easy as possible for you to do those things. I tell people all the time that it took us three times to get the visual representation for lambda expressions (i.e., gray rings) right. Our first version, in BYOB3, was terrible. We did a second round in BYOB 3.1 that was better, but still not good enough. Only in Snap! 4.0 did we get it right. That's the sort of thing that's a good use of our time.
Every time I see a flagged forum post I groan. That's not a good use of our time.
Putting in stars and hearts wouldn't be a good use of time, but neither would building AI programs to sniff out illicit popularity contests.
I suppose you don't want someone getting too angry about veiws. Like KAJ on scratch ...
Well, we're talking about follows here, not views. Also, kaj claimed they were going to hack Scratch, but actually weren't a hacker, and probably were a kid about 10. And in fact, when a user that said was kaj contacted the Scratch Team, they said they weren't sad about the controversy around them, and in fact were happy about how famous they have became.
I agree with @happyrebecca and and @pacmastermeow I think the follower count should be visible, and not because "Scratch has it", I think that because for me, seeing my follower count is like motivation for a very hard project you are working on. It feeds me like fuel and keeps my energy up so that way I can finish the project faster!