I have a similar issue, especially when looking for the meaning of a verb that has many uses. Instead of trying to understand all the meanings of the verb, I focus on one or two interpretations and try to use them in examples.

For me, 'boringly pretty' is confusing but 'superficially pretty' is easier to understand; it's only pretty at first sight.

Being covered in scorpions is riskier and more disgusting so I choose the first one, at least all I need is to be patient.

By the way, can we use covered with/by scorpions?

I'm interested too !

I think you should thank these boys who are sending just 'Hi'. How would you react if the messages you receive every day were long paragraphs as mentioned in the guideline?  You will ignore them too or at least most of them and maybe you will add a detailed cv and a recommendation letter to the guideline!! We (who send "Hi") are making it simpler: we send "Hi", it doesn't need much time like a personalized message, then, if we get "Hi" from the other person we interpret it as a sign of openness and then we introduce ourselves and dive into more interesting conversations, if we get ignored we just move on.

If you are a native speaker and you are not receiving a lot of messages you have to ask yourself "why", suppose there are some thousands of native speaker here in italiki so the number of people learning English will be some millions ...