Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
You can skin and theme an instance however you want, and the lemmi-ui code is open source so you can completely customize that side of things too. It’s a complete non issue the instant someone with design capabilities contributes.