I’m constantly surprised by the number of people who aren’t aware of the Summarize button.
Case in point:
To be fair it only appears below the OP of topics which exceed 50 replies, so if you’ve been following the topic since the outset your return visits could well mean you won’t see it pop up.
It would be very useful to have another way to access a summary from the topic timeline and progress bar.
And, while we’re at it, the OP/mods/TL3+ being given the ability to manually include/disinclude posts from the summary would be nice. Especially if they could turn off all non-manually-selected posts for a truly customizable summary for topics that might benefit.
This already happens because staff likes are weighted especially heavily in that summary. So as staff, be sure to like things if you want to affect summarize results.
That’s not the same as what I said?
It’s similar in one aspect for one category of people, but staff should be able to like things they don’t think need to be in a summary as well.
I find that people are rarely willing to spend the time on manual curation, so as a result it doesn’t happen.
The better advice is to participate in a topic as you normally would and like things that meaningfully contribute to the conversations going on. This benefits everyone.
What if staff aren’t actively participating because almost all of them are focused on a Discourse server running alongside the Discourse instance, and the OPs we have are the kind of people who are extremely likely to take advantage of such a feature?
Because that is my situation, at least.
You make it sound like the community has issues which technology is going to be hard-pressed to remedy. At best it would plastering band-aids over symptoms, right?
That doesn’t sound like a discourse-related problem at all.
Unfortunately, I have no control over the actions of our site administration.
All I can do is make the best of what we have, and fight to make that better. 
Correct, but as a community you have a choice as to whether you visit and post. The payoffs must be outweighing the problems if you’re still compelled to participate.
Anyhow, this is a tangent - as @codinghorror has already pointed out the algorithm which selects posts already includes the opinion of staff as to what should be included. Maybe if you can incline others to try the feature you can garner other feedback which might be useful. My principle concern is with others finding the button.
At this point it’s only for the community for a fair few of us.
Still, I will admit this is not your main point and stop going off-topic.
A tiny twist I do support is unconditionally including posts that have “Staff Notices”, seems like a small change that would make lots of sense.
Are all notices for good reasons?
I would say they are always there cause the mods think they are important and they want people to read them.
I hear you, but part of the advice we explicitly give staff is that they need to make participation part of their daily routine too…
Leadership comes from the top. The presence of staff speaks volumes about whether your community is alive and thriving. Don’t just say you believe in this community, demonstrate that through your personal participation and enthusiasm. Lead by example. Reply to questions people have, help your community learn the ropes, gently guide and shape the community as you go.
… otherwise how can you expect others to?
So, is there any hope we can make access to summarize more readily available?
How exactly, what specifically are you proposing?
Ideally access from the topic progress/timeline. Failing that something in the topic controls. It’s a great feature but it’s only visible directly below the OP, so it’s easily forgotten and horribly underused.
That’s not much of an actual proposal. One thing that’s been discussed, but I think would be far too extreme, is for old long topics to be forced into summary mode when you open them.
Reddit actually does something like this as a default for anonymous users… experiment over there to see what I mean.
A call out when a user enters their first large topic to educate them on the feature would be killer.
Problem there is when you end up arriving at a topic care of Google and can’t see the search hit.