One of the Pi-hole dev's here. The comment you are replying to is talking about the blog post about this CVE, not Pi-hole's aesthetics. (Which haven't changed, btw)
That post is 2 years old, and the op understood and was ok with the outcome...
Oobe is either
1)leave suggested defaults as is
2)don't use those lists.
Option 2 is available in the installer before you're even up and running. There is only so much hand holding we can do, to be fair. We have an extensive support community, and plenty of documentation, and yes, whilst I agree some users may fall between the cracks, the majority are able to find a solution to their problems.
Hmmm, not sure I recall. Mind linking back to the conversation? Point is, we don't choose what domains are blocked or not, so there is nothing we can do except ship with a default whitelist. But we're not going to do that either, if we were to start doing that... what's to say we wouldn't whitelist something more nefarious.
It's safest for us, and our reputation, to stay out of the finer points of the actual blocked/not domains and instead defer to individual list maintainers who make that their business.
As commented below, we don't actually maintain any of the lists, so that wasn't us you spoke to!
You can configure the lists that you use to suit your needs. You can also whitelist any domains that you need. It's up to you what you ultimately block!