I agree fully. This is how I used Reddit, but with the caveat that it was fairly well exclusively with third party apps. There’s a functional argument to this conversation in my view.
My workflow was essentially one of the following:
1. Read through my topic-specific subs;
2. Append “site:reddit.com” to Google searches to make Google return results that weren’t a waste of my time. Reddit links opened in my client(s).
Unfortunately for me, the official app and the new site are both absolute garbage. Wasted space, poor user experience, more ads than content, harassment to use the app, and they’re both just so _slow_ to perform basic operations. None of that has to be that way. Good design isn’t antithetical to ad revenue. I’d argue it’s the opposite.
I don’t really have an enjoyable way to engage with Reddit anymore, and that’s my biggest “pedestrian” gripe. Though I do take exception to Steve Huffman and Tim Rathschmidt’s absolutely asinine handling of the API changes outwardly. But since I have no enjoyable way to enjoy Reddit, my ideological disagreements are effectively immaterial.