The instant tell for me, from the start, is that having Premium didn’t let you use 3rd party apps.
Well, aside from the CEO’s behavior, anyway.
Why is this whole profit thing a question? Premium is literally “Pay us instead of seeing ads” and it doesn’t matter which frontend is using those resources if you’ve paid for them.
It would have solved all the theoretical problems, but not only didn’t reddit offer it, they rejected it. Totally disingenuous. They don’t want normal profit and money to run the servers, they want complete control over access to the content we generate, and all the metadata around that.
Kong with silence and (only) radiation ignis wraith was my go-to for farming them when I was doing it.