I was just a bottom-level dev, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seemed like the focus was on making the site appealing to a broader audience so that we could grow our user base and be taken seriously as a challenger to Facebook and Twitter.

Many of the people hired for the redesign didn’t seem to fully understand the magic that made Reddit successful in the first place, so there was a big disconnect that made itself manifest in what you now view as the new site.