I wonder if Kevin has done this because he is so in tune with what the geek-crowd think and if so has he made this decision for the right reasons? The geeks here in HN and elsewhere are always going to complain the loudest about things like the DiggBar. However, Digg is trying to go mainstream - do the normals really care about the DiggBar? Presuming they represent >99% of Digg's desired audience should they really make a change for the 1% that are moaning? Admittedly I have no idea what the point of the Digg bar is because I too hate it, but I wonder if amongst the normals it is achieving its business goal and therefore should stay?
I believe their desired audience is that 99% (now that the core tech crowd has left). Have you seen the programming section's 'popular' page? It's practically barren. That's how you know the original tech crowd left. In Digg's prime that section was poppin', so to speak.
That's kind of what the parent comment was pointing out. There aren't really tech geeks on Digg anymore, and the presumption is that only tech geeks care about not having the DiggBar. So maybe it doesn't make sense to get rid of it, if most of the people on Digg don't care anyway.
The average person does not care at all about framing people's stuff. Look at all the URL shortners on Twitter. There's a good number of "normal" people using Twitter and they don't seem to care.
Just playing devil's advocate.