All of those things can be verified before storing the password in any way, encrypted or not, and checking them would be a requisite before storing it.
While it's true that they don't have a significant impact on the hash generated, they make it significantly more difficult for anyone to guess your password. It's much easier to guess password321 than something like Or^9L%u&QQ12XxI@. And that has nothing to do with how the password is ultimately stored.
I think I actually prefer the simplicity of the old one. In general, I find logos with too many textures a little distracting or "noisy"
I'm definitely trying to be, which isn't difficult considering that my last comment there was a year ago, and I only made 5 comments that year.
I'd been on reddit for 11 years, and I was more active back then, but I sort of started to just lurk more as time went by, probably because there was an ocean of comments in every post
There's an option to block entire instances in Connect; they'd still show up in your browser, but it's good enough if you primarily browse on mobile