I don't want a broom. I don't want a hat. I don't want a mug.
I want to be able to visit the queue, do some work, and not feel like the bellhop in Hilbert's Hotel. My continuing belief is that an algorithm could close -- even delete -- a large fraction of what's in there now, but I can't prove it.
One fallback idea is to forget about history. If something is more than a day old, punt it from the queue. Use the queue to get attention onto the most important area: the front page. Make it a way to gather community attention onto incoming crud.
If you want to have humans slog through 80k of crap, try presenting it to them in batches that they can complete. Make an 'old close queue' that never has more than 1000 things in it because the system only dumps the next 1000 things into it when we finish dealing with the previous 1000 things.