First of all - when people visit a new site for the first time and see familiar stuff, instead of new and exciting stuff, they tend to leave before they even dig deeper on the site.
The design is fine, the layout is difficult - you should use rectangles of different sizes and backgrounds to make it easier for the visitor to focus on content that are more important, new or viral.
What is dangerous about the assumption that the most popular things are the most written about, are that you ignore new things that MIGHT get traction, what you'd need is a time-machine - list things before they get HOT HOT HOT! So that people who visit the site have a larger reason to do so.
And think about what kind of users you want, the middle-aged people that love lists? Or the lazy teenager who love trends but feel that lists are for shores.
It seems like you have technical people on your team; so if you are not counting your time why is the number so high?
Even with design and team of two-three engineers consulting for a month or two that figure is extremely high.
I'm a designer and previous developer myself, but the site is actually quite broad. There is a lot more than meets the eye, such as: - an administration area - caching and indexing mechanisms - web scraping robots - various other agents and robots to update user feeds, top lists, etc. - algorithms to calculate relevance and weight for the items on each list - Wordpress plugins, possibility to embed lists, etc. ...and so forth. It's a pretty big site.
I still think you paid more than the site is worth but... you can get that kind of rate for freelancing PHP? I think I need to move to Norway.
If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.
The 'additional' requirements that were listed to justify this such as administration area, caching layer, feeds, etc are really basic items.
So unless they wrote their own web server I don't see any issues with flagging this.
For all you know that figure could have been made up.
Just a general observation, I don't know much about your architecture.
The site definitely reminds me of PG advice about made up startup ideas not solving an actual problem. Social networking sites helped users connect with their friends online easily. Not sure as a user why I should signup to your site and start building lists of knowledge unless I am getting something (business, revenue cut, etc).
You might look at instructables. People want to show off the things they build so they create tutorials about it. Pretty good community. There's probably room to sell the supplies in an e-commerce store and maybe give the authors a cut of the revenue. Seems much less forced than "build a list and share it with your friends!"
My own shot at this is in Halloween/Fall/Events. I envisioned some sort of way to find events, meet people and get the knowledge/stuff you need to attend. We are still in Facebook's "adding the course catalogs" stage though. Add dot com to my username and then let your imagination really run. We've spent around 10K but have put in a lot of sweat equity.
If social eCommerce becomes huge, I think it will transform Halloween costume sales online and we will be better positioned than a traditional costume shop. Can you say the same about listnerd? If no, then you need to pick a different area to start building a community.