Did you try any other apps? The official Reddit app didn't even come close to their usability. As far as saying that no single dev could build it in a year - well I don't know how long it would've taken for the latest codebases, but to my knowledge RIF and Apollo (perhaps the most popular unofficial apps for Android and Apple, respectively) were developed by single people, and they were widely praised for being far more usable than the official app.

Yes, I used a bunch of them over the years. And yeah, they were fine, but that doesn’t answer my question about what exactly is wrong with the official Reddit client to garner so much hate.

They were widely considered to be significantly better. The official app had less features, was often annoying to use, and just didn't even work all the time. At least for RIF, I liked: better performance, more reliable (official app would just decide not to load ANY media sometimes), no notification spam, higher density information, more customizable, better separation between ads and posts (and a small purchase to get rid of them entirely), the list goes on. It was pretty obvious once you used them for a day or two.

They were “widely considered” to be better, but again, almost never with any specifics. Just knee jerk hate.

And I don’t have any of those issues with the official client, other than the ad one. The performance is great, it’s very reliable, I have most notifications disabled except for a couple things I care about (and the notification settings are pretty fine-grained).

Maybe the customization stuff could be more extensive? But I don’t want 1000 settings for every tiny little thing. Regardless, it hardly seems like a complaint that people would get so worked up over.

Maybe the official client used to be much worse and I don’t remember, but increasingly I think people are just pissed about Reddit cutting off the alternative clients and hate being forced to change, so they moan and groan as if the official client is the worst app they’ve ever used. When really, it’s fine.

It sounds like you don't have a problem with it. Maybe you never encountered the issues, or maybe you just have a higher tolerance for them. I did give specifics, and if you cared to look they're well documented - it's hardly knee jerk hate. Over 1.5 million people were annoyed enough by them to buy Apollo alone. And for the record, these complaints were present from far before Reddit decided to get so stingy with their API.