My guess: AlienBlue was developed with power users in mind and this new app was developed with showing people ads in mind.

A major re-design gives them the excuse to remove and never re-add many features and tune the app for a different type of user and a different type of interaction.

AB was developed by one person (who is still on the app team) - it's possible AB isn't suited to having a team work on it, or they want to follow new best practices (eg. Swift)