I understand that - I first got into fandom in the Lord of the Rings fandom soon after the second film came out - loads of dreck but also some wonderful stories. At the time, I started out on fanfiction.net which at that point didn't really have much in the way of recs, so I learnt to just jump in and try reading and quit if it was a story that I didn't want to read - of course, it helped that it was while I was an undergrad, so I had loads of free time.
I find that Sturgeon's Law (in the general version) applies to fanfiction as much as to any other fiction.