I agree completely. We intentionally designed the old interface to be information dense. When we made it slightly less dense, there was such a strong pushback that we had to add an option to go back to the more dense mode.

But there are a lot of users who don't care. And maintaining two interfaces is double the work of maintaining one, because you have test everything twice. And it's actually geometric, not double, because you have to test every new option combination in both interfaces.

The difference in information density really isn't that large. Here's a comparison of the current top posts (and not even using the compact view): https://imgur.com/a/WsI3pBj

According to your screenshots:

- Height of post list with 8 posts, redesign: 855 px

- Height of post list with 8 posts, old: 691 px

- Height of thread with 7.5 comments, redesign: 1008 px

- Height of thread with 11 posts, old: 1054 px

That's ~24% more space taken in the post list, and 40% (!) more space taken for the comment thread.

I disagree. At least, if I load www.reddit.com/r/programming and old.reddit.com/r/programming, it's immediately apparent that new UI is much less dense:

https://i.imgur.com/2NPpxyw