I tried my best to find a happy medium between those two goals, which I long believed was possible, but it ended up kind of just causing the site to suck at both things.

That's because the "muh freeze peech" trolls you should've been removing, that effectively spam the place with the lowest possible quality of content, are the exact same Voat trolls that drove away anyone interesting from Voat in the first place as well. You should have strictly stuck to the concept of a pyramid of debate and immediately shown those people the door, but in spite of repeated insistent requests to do so you didn't.

Why you ever thought you'd be able to tolerate such a hostile userbase while also pretending to have a pyramid of debate still baffles me. The answer was clear from the start: They don't care, they're actively here to trash the place, go back to Voat. You chose not to. This isn't just "trying to do two things at opposite ends", this is actively bending the knee to a particular kind of user that just wants to have yet another place to fling poo from. You flatly just did not enforce what ANYONE expected from the central thesis you published in the FAQ, and as a result almost everyone who actually cared about that up and left after REPEATEDLY requesting you enforce it and your REPEATED refusal to do so, until it bit you in the ass the exact way everyone warned you it would.

Basically the question is this: Why would anyone care about your future or ongoing projects when it's clear from this one you refuse to enforce your own website guidelines the moment something gets popular? In fact you're only now talking about it because you're bleeding that same popularity. Had you cared from the start none of this would've happened.