I just reread the archives from 2011 and it’s surprising that pretty much no one saw the issue the way I see it now. The change can be traced to this feature request by Patrick which got highly upvoted. But it only proposed having a welcome page somewhere, not making it the default! Then it became default and nobody objected, even though other aspects of the redesign got many comments (see e.g. here, or in thesefivepostsbyMatt). I guess the community had more momentum back then, and Eliezer had been chronically neglecting to promote enough stuff to Main, so the loss of focus on Main wasn’t seen as important. But as you say, that decision probably cost us in the end.
Yeah.
I just reread the archives from 2011 and it’s surprising that pretty much no one saw the issue the way I see it now. The change can be traced to this feature request by Patrick which got highly upvoted. But it only proposed having a welcome page somewhere, not making it the default! Then it became default and nobody objected, even though other aspects of the redesign got many comments (see e.g. here, or in these five posts by Matt). I guess the community had more momentum back then, and Eliezer had been chronically neglecting to promote enough stuff to Main, so the loss of focus on Main wasn’t seen as important. But as you say, that decision probably cost us in the end.