That's one way to spin "pick a view on free speech and stick to it," I suppose. The problem with Reddit's relationship with free speech is that it's so haphazard, reactionary, and unpredictable. There's an entire section of the site devoted to lynching black people, but another section regarding the same exact treatment of overweight people is the one that got the attention. They said that's due to "harassment," when in fact the real reason is because FPH had gotten big enough to put hatred on /r/all, due to its size. Personally, I think both sections of the site are vile, but I vastly prefer a uniform standard being applied to both, rather than which wheel is squeakiest at the moment. If you look at the common theme in the announcements, it's "what about ____?," not "I'm really sad FatPeopleHate is gone." That's telling.
I don't think anyone wants Reddit to be a haven for abuse. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of other sites for that. The latest reaction to FPH's removal is due to the Magic 8-ball approach to free speech, which goes all the way back to violentacrez (ban Gawker for outing him, ban /r/jailbait to make Anderson Cooper go away, turn a blind eye to the 50 subreddits that launched in /r/jailbait's vacuum and now collectively outsubscribe its legacy).
Reddit until very, very recently championed free speech in public. Ellen Pao has consistently walked that back in interviews, which is chafing the longer-term users; her direct statements in contradiction to earlier Reddit causes make me think she's a bit more culpable than you imply. I have to say, after six years of my account, I've definitely noticed a change on Reddit in, say, the last six months. Yishan Wong definitely started it, and you may be right about some of the inherited problems; I remember Yishan showing up in a thread and saying if a subreddit generates a lot of gold revenue, Reddit thinks twice about banning it. That it's even part of the thought process was a huge surprise to a lot of people.
Tonight isn't about free speech, though, in the slightest. Victoria's sudden firing -- the easy answer is the Jesse Jackson AMA, but I'm hearing whispers of disagreements with management over monetizing AMAs (a couple of those whispers are showing up in public) -- woke up a bunch of unpaid moderators to the fact that they cultivate a shitload of ad impressions and revenue for an administration team that cares absolutely zero about them. If it weren't for moderators, Reddit would be far more awful than it already is, and Reddit, Inc. has done a very bad job of taking care of the moderators who keep the site usable in return for nothing. Your point on this is completely salient and it has been festering as organizational debt; that's a really good way to put that, and I'm stealing it.