No it's not, it didn't get popular until it was redesigned. It's proof that sites can be too ugly, but that sites don't have to be particularly pretty.
What redesign are you referring to? Reddit has never changed much in its design. I'm looking at it in the Wayback Machine from before subreddits were introduced, and it still looks like the same site.
I was literally just thinking that reddit's staff are either all back-end engineers or don't do anything at all. reddit has barely changed at all in the past several years. The design has barely changed. They finally just recently put out a mobile app. Little to no improvement has been made in moderator tools. Where is this redesign you seem to be seeing?
Reddit got popular when Digg was redesigned.