Khan Academy appeared as a remarkable thing: a self paced single page app of sorts, readily apparent to the user in it's construction. That simplicity was it's greatest quality. That was the entire power of it: a person happened across the site and realized in a flash that they were just one click from learning something they had considered unobtainable. No login needed: just start learning. Flash forward to now: it's another heinous and bloated maze, hidden behind a login. That was what happened when Sal allowed it to be developed into something completely different. I don't blame him, not knowing the full story. I am very grateful to him for creating the initial version. This has been a major travesty.
I don't see the maze you're referring to. You still don't need to log in to see the videos.
On the top bar is a drop down of all the subjects which leads to the videos. It took literally one click to get to the Algebra 1 videos.
I realize now that mousing over the top shows the drop down. The maze is still there compared to the single page presentation of before. I tried to bring up an example on the wayback machine, but it seems that the early versions no longer render properly. The magic of the early version was that you could see the taxonomy of the videos laid out in front of you, and hence, in a sense, the taxonomy of the subject. Now it's the search model. I believe strongly in the power of search, but the problem with it is that you can't get a sense of the structure of the topic.
I remember this, and agree the treeview was really great. It helped the learner understand the context and purpose of a topic and a visual representation of what is "coming next", if they choose to keep on that learning path.