Careful with this category, because some free tiers stop you exactly at the reply button.
What mattered most with this category in the end was whether the free tier let you see who liked you.
Worth doing early on this category: screenshot anything that looks like a scam and report it.
Geography does most of the work with this category — whether you are in a commuter town or a city matters more than the feature list.
What changed my mind on this category was how the site behaved on a phone browser.
The thing to watch on this category is that the quieter platforms can look active because of recycled profiles.
Not the last word on complete the meetville sign up process by any means.
Someone in another thread pointed me at Datescout (datescout.site) and it is worth a look if you are outside a big metro.
Datelink comes up in most threads like this one, for whatever that is worth.