Yeah, I got that same sense from it, but I too am very familiar with the issue so perhaps we're just not its target audience. The possibly interesting thing to me is this Reddit has a large ecosystem of third-party tools and apps built around it by users - from Reddit Enhancement Suite to a plethora of mobile apps - and has been fairly careful not to step too much on their toes. In the past companies have burned developers by breaking APIs and changing policies to suit the needs of the new first-party apps over the third-party apps which helped build their userbase.It also has plans to eventually release its own smartphone apps.
I think you're very soon going to see reddit stop giving a care about their third party developers. It'll probably try to hire the good ones (RES possible, AlienBlue guy practically had a job opening aimed at him a few months ago), and then shit on the rest. There are some signs of it already, such as altering the API to take away vote counts (I know that's not stated correctly, it's a bit above my understanding how that works, if someone wants to explain it here). Overall behavior these last few years has leaned that way. I could definitely be wrong, that's just the vibe I'm getting. If they want to push ad revenue, they'd be stupid not to build a great app and then put ads / in-app purchase to remove ads within it.
The developers of RES and AlienBlue have both had open job offers at Reddit for multiple years. Both of them continue to turn those jobs down because the benefits offered by Reddit Inc. are not compelling enough to make them want to do more than hobbyist-level stuff.
Reddit had a dedicated iOS client. They abandoned it because they didn't like dealing with the App Store.