It’s a very easy change to default ‘Auto expand media’ to true for half of new users, and see what effect it has over a few months. It’s also a fun experiment with no real drawbacks.

Writing the code to do that is very easy, determining what metrics are actually important and impact user success and what metrics accurately track user success is much harder.

I do generally agree though! Personally I just asked the instance admins of lemmy.ca to redirect lemmy.ca/r/… URLs to lemmy.ca/c/… URLs as a tiny user facing feature for Redditors coming over, and they did it in a second.