While I understand the sentiment, reddit is going public and will try everything to increase short-term profits for the share-holders. Getting rid of third-party apps is just one way to achieve this, other changes will follow and there is just no turning back, unfortunately.
They could have easily created pricing tiers which would have skimmed the maximum profit off each. Likewise they could embed ads in the API as a condition of access (even granting ad-free access for premium members).
For whatever reason they chose not to do these things. I'm leaning towards incompetence rather than malice.
Meh, I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing, they can't be stupid enough to believe that asking that much money to indie devs is realistic, they just want a way to kill other apps to force people using their official app.
Agreed. They've just made the most tone-deaf update in /r/modnews as well that goes on to address zero concerns users have, while sending canned responses with zero actual useful information to the few comments they have replied to.
It's really sad to see Reddit in this state, as a long time user.