If you have an account you can set this as the default. old.reddit.com + RES works really well for me. I really hope old.reddit.com does not go away.

yes I have this, with some curation of the content, it's can be reasonably pleasant. If they get rid of the old UI, reddit becomes digg.com and dies a quick death.

If old.reddit.com ever does go away, I'll stop using it. Even on a modern computer, with a decent internet connection, the "improved" one is sluggish and slow to load, almost as bad as Facebook. It's effectively the opposite of Hacker News.