Unfortunately, that's the only way it was ever going to go. I'm not defending spez whatsoever, and I think he's a huge piece of shit, but at some point, you, me, and everyone else knew the founders et al were going to cash out. It's just that they went about it in probably the single most underhanded, backstabbing manner conceivable.

I'd love to see what happens to old.reddit.com. When that goes, I'd be willing to bet a small chunk of change that most of whatever power users were left after the change are out. The re-design was so utterly disastrous I'd be shocked if many of the more prolific contributors to the site stick around.