Recognising recurring characters is part of the charm for me, too. And also:
While your typical lemming's behaviour is not perfect, it's still leagues above your typical redditor's. For a start I used to dread the orange mail icon... as I saw it I immediately thought, "oh great here comes a dumb fuck distorting what I say". The bell icon is still a positive for me.
My own behaviour has been positively affected. [cat analogy]
I didn't declaw myself, but I don't feel as much of a need to extend my claws as before. [/cat analogy]
In Reddit I used to pick fights all the time, I simply don't see the need to do so here, even when exposed to the same annoyances as before.
Once your feed is curated, it's mostly fun stuff? I do see some politics, but not as much to feel like it's only political discussion here.
I actually trust the admin of my current instance to do what's the best for the users, within his capabilities. I couldn't trust the Reddit admins to die properly. And when the worst came to pass (disagreeing with how the admins of my older instance handle users), I know I don't need to either ditch everything or suck it up.