Have you disabled all your addons to see if this is a factor?
Have you checked your permissions with a super admin account?
Have you rebuild the admin CP style to see if a style change has affected it?
Then he'd have more code to maintain! And Shawn doesn't code for money - he has plenty. Have you seen some of his posts of his rigs and server farms???
I can't remember the specifics but it was something to do with reddit charging for api access, I believe Google was one of their first deals.
Rumours were $50m/y.
Also came at a convenient time when reddit were about to have their IPO.