All the best to you and the team, I understand it can be rough. But similarly, I think most of what you wrote could just as well have been written by a Lemmy maintainer:

I think a lot of folks don’t realize how hard it is… All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves… The whole team here has dumped 1000’s of hours into keeping this thing alive. It’s just rough to see the comments here.

Lemmy devs are in exactly the same position, and reading the comments in this thread, I am getting the vibe that lemmy.world admins are not willing to see this. Just check the messaging your admins are putting out there (even in the comments under this post), imagine reading that messaging as a Lemmy dev, and tell me it wouldn’t feel just as rough.

Btw, I think a clear source of all the negative comments here is not the fact that Sublinks is being developed. Every time Sublinks gets advertised on Lemmy, there is this toxic “finally we can get rid of the original Lemmy dev team” messaging along with it - sometimes it is more hidden between the lines, other times, it’s very blatant. This messaging inevitably creates uncertainty in users about the future of their instances. THAT’S the real issue here, at least from my point of view.

Considering that Lemmy is an open source project which is being built collectively by a big community, your comment sounds extremely strange. You are basically saying “we did not do enough testing for the 0.19.3 release, and we accept none of the blame for it.”

Edit: The more I think about your comment, the more strange it becomes… you guys are literally running the biggest instance, but rather than participate in the testing of big releases, you let smaller instances do it for you and then complain if nobody else is testing it at your scale. Your comments would be completely understandable if this was a paid product, but come on… Just think about it, would you also have this kind of approach for IRL community projects?