It might be just that Reddit is still fairly young and doesn't have a lot of employees. Maybe they want to add features like "showing number of unread comments

It might be just that Reddit is still fairly young and doesn't have a lot of employees. Maybe they want to add features like "showing number of unread comments since last visit" or "better ad management system." When you work at a small company, features like that can get sidelined for months to do something like "build algorithm for tying different users together as one entity to ensure bans aren't trivially worked around." With things like that happening, you can lose a lot of developer time on this kind of stuff without them even directly handling bans / policy decisions.