Counter argument one. The circle jerk was strong, sure, but there's a massive difference between a subreddit like r/history or r/worldnews and some of the more obscure, random bullshit. Was there a wall? Absolutely, but it was full of doors and windows that anyone could easily walk or see through that were very rarely locked. Now? The wall is down and a flood of shit is pouring out. Counter argument two. r/all was always just a click away, so "admin curating" was always negligible at best.
In that case a good front-page would curate itself to be all of those things and give users a good broad general taste of reddit's different communities. If you just put history up as the main sub the people coming into reddit will look very different than if you just put up blackpeopletwitter. We need a balance of all the subs as to not encourage or direct reddit in a specific direction, which I do not think the admins should be doing.