There is no "the" reader. There's a statistical cloud of readers with highly variant preferences.

You guys need to understand that the community is divided about these questions. I don't mean divided politically on partisan lines (though that as well), I mean divided around what sorts of topics are the best fit for the site.

There are those who feel like each letter to each government agency is a major new story that obviously deserves frontpage time; and there are those who feel like HN is overrun with this sort of thing already. Ditto for every major topic including, as you say, AI: some feel like there's too much, some feel like there's not enough.

There's no HN user, including me, who's satisfied with the balance of stories on the front page. The more passionate you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) are about a particular topic, the more it feels like the topic is being unfairly and outrageously suppressed, whether by user flags or the mods or both.

This is ultimately all coming from the fundamentals of how HN works—from its initial conditions, if you like—and those aren't likely to change. Feelings about it do uptick during times of political intensity, such as now, but the underlying phenomenon is consistent and has been for many years.

Edit: here's me making a similar point from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644521, in case anyone was thinking this is a new phenomenon...