Honestly i don't think these are good enough reasons to create a new project, there are other open source reddit alternatives and non of them toke off, it's hard to build a project like that and having NLNET funding might have made it seem easier then it is.

Forking might have been a better options, or just developing a sever addon API so you could create plugins like on wordpress or discourse.

I tend to believe competition is good but in this case it seems like it will just fragment the already limited resources of the fediverse.

I warned someone that the project he started probably won't replace an existing popular project and eventually he seems to have abandon it, he could have spend that time improving the existing project.

I realize this is not feel good advice and i could be wrong, but i felt like i should say it.