Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
Yes people do like nice design and user interfaces. Apple managed to grab a large market share by understanding that.
It doesn’t have to be cluttered but it doesn’t have to be … this.
If you want things to improve, you are going to have to accept criticism that your current crush isn’t perfect. There is already a lot of the toxic Reddit’ness that has come over, we don’t need more.