Personally, I'm OK with technical hurdles like "not using .com like a normal website" keeping the people who think any website domain should be .com off the platform.
Reddit got worse as it got more popular. Especially once it crossed the threshold of being popular enough to be worth investing time and money into making bots that could be easily confused with normal people, whether for advertising, scamming, or disinformation purposes.
I don't disagree at all, but I also think it's important to keep the conversation focused on the benefits. eg: "I'm happy to trade Reddit's UI for a platform that doesn't encourage toxic behavior" (and so on).
EDIT: The threadiverse will not ever be Reddit and we won't be able to please everyone, I think it's important to portray confidence in the platform and not get bogged down defending the (less important) flaws.
I've been trying the Photon/Voyager approach, the issue is that some people despise Photon and modernist interfaces with a passion, there's a comment on that thread I had to link to old.lemmy.zip
I've been focused lately on changing some UI aspects of Photon to please both sides, compact mode is now comparable to old reddit (while looking good) and it's the default. People who like them can switch to the cozy interface on their own.