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Have the makers of the 3rd party clients considered creating a reddit clone?

Technically that’s not too hard. Moreover, these clients have a large user base. Some even have revenue. I guess the most tricky part is content moderation.

Has this been discussed or proposed anywhere?

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As an example, Apollo has around 50k paying members currently. Even if we say 10% are really hardcore ones and will jump ship (and not just use Reddit’s default app which is decent if not feature rich), how many of those 10% will still retain Reddit as a parallel app, and how many of those will get frustrated very fast because growth is very hard in this space owing to federated nature of upcoming social networks and growing personal server costs and the time it will take for that social network to become mature like reddit. Will the remaining ones who stuck with the new ship and probably brought new members as well as part of scaling, be enough to generate enough revenue for those apps to continue investing in the new social network?

Also, what I have understood with these Reddit 3rd party app developers - seeing multiple ones over the years from Alien Blue to Readit to Apollo - is that these guys are pretty good at understanding complexity and solving it via their good designs but a social network is not just all this as we have seen with Reddit itself and now twitter. It’s about moderation, nurturing communities, formulating effective user friendly policies across communities and much more. Which none of these app developers have experience with.

One "easier" middle ground is that if they would work on aggressive caching of requests and then maybe building a "shadow reddit" in the background

You could make your Api usage go really down this way

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