Yeah, I think that's exactly what's happening: We have thousands of eyeballs looking for things, so it creates the illusion that people are finding things "easily". Rather, it's just by virtue of how many people are stumbling upon things, not to mention visiting the right hot-spots in a few cases. If the goal is to discover something that is yet unknown, in a far away location, it's down to pure luck.
I don't think there's any EDSM tracking. I'm not sure if there are any plans to do so, and I haven't looked to see what the journals record. But that would be ideal, IMHO. With a large data set, we could probably figure out a lot about the placement rules, and deduce where additional locations might be. But perhaps that's considered cheating?