As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.
You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.
There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".
After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?
I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.
I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?
If what you're about to do after taking over was actually "what the people want" then you wouldn't have to take over.
If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.
Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise.
So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.
the defaults are important because they let people use the site before they decide they want to sign up
Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen.
Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.
have defaults with strict moderation, and alienate newcomers
have defaults with loose moderation, and the voting algorithm will favor the most superficial, bitsized posts.
All the best!
Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.
In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.