Ultimately I think you are correct but a lot of the details here are slightly to majorly incorrect. For instance, unless something has changed, wasn’t Dessalines rather than Nutomic the main dev, with the former having started the code and then brought in the latter later on?

Lemmy most definitely shadow-censors people’s experiences too. Did you know that every Lemmy instance - not just ML - has a hidden list of communities that it shadow-bans? Some instance admins are extremely friendly and go out of their way to publicly declare this fact, but most do not, and unlike the listing of (de)federated instances, Lemmy inherently chooses to hide rather than display this information. Lemmy.ml also by default acts as the arbiter of what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances upon first installation (though both this setting and the communities themselves can be adjusted later by someone who knows what they are doing and how to accomplish that).

Most of the manner in which Lemmy is opinionated though shows up in the features that are less obvious or non-existent rather than displayed right in your face like PieFed does. e.g. PieFed chooses to bother to notify end-users when a moderator bans them from a community or even an entire instance, while Lemmy merely buries that information deep in the modlog and most people either never find out or only do so months to literally years after it happening. Do people have a “right” to know such? PieFed prominently displays such so vehemently declares yes while Lemmy merely remains merely silent, a more implicit but equally vehement no. Likewise, upon deletion of a post Lemmy displays a page that acts like it never existed in the first place and in fact looks more like a server error than content issue or acknowledgement of the facts of the true situation, whereas PieFed by default deletes only the OP’s contribution yet keeps the comment section intact, available to anyone with the original URL (mods can override this though).

That said, PieFed’s vote quota shadow-censoring contributions from users on other platforms - Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. - without disclosure of that fact is fairly heinous, and particularly the manner behind its rollout (in defiance of all advice to the contrary) may be the forerunner to spelling out loss of confidence in the entire software project, provoking fears of additional such changes coming in the future, without notice and against all push-back. PieFed is quite opinionated indeed, and also seems to be veering away from Reddit-esque “social media” and more towards a professional, serious-content-only microblogging style.

That said, most of the criticism against PieFed has been shown to represent outright disinformation, as digging deeper most accusations were shown to be not just slightly but blatantly false (though despite that the original post remains up without having been corrected), hence made (and spread) by people without knowledge of how software works. e.g. most of the “hard-coded” features turn out not only to not be hard-coded after all, but outright (and extremely friendly) opt-in rather than opt-out (unfortunately not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out).

Someone installing their own instance can get a great deal out of running PieFed rather than Lemmy, with the former’s significantly enhanced feature set, while for people relying upon a public instance your experience will be affected far more by choice of admin team than the software that they choose to be running under the hood - especially if you are accessing it via a 3rd-party app like Voyager that offers only rudimentary access to many of the bells & whistles only accessible on PieFed anyway, like user and post flairs, polls, combining together comments across all cross-posts, categories of communities which represent user-customizable and shareable topic feeds, the initial account sign-up wizard, etc.

So a lot of what you related here about PieFed filtering out content is not fully true - like lemmy.ml’s extremism it applies to the PieFed.social instance itself, and yes it is possible to turn on that same filtering by choosing the opt-in feature upon installation of another instance (much like installation of a Lemmy instance can by default populate itself with communities that are acknowledged i.e. not banned by Lemmy.ml), but an instance admin can also make different choices too. For instance the vote quota can be essentially disabled by assigning it to a ridiculous value that would be impossible for an actual human being to reach.

Overall: PieFed is a shiny and new, fast-paced, but also opinionated and controversial project. Whether it’s going to be a “peace of mind” or “power tripping dev hellscape” software is only for you to experience.

This is… entirely accurate, sadly. Fortunately as you mentioned there is the PyLova fork actively working against these censorship features, plus adding new ones of its own, for instance admins that don’t want to have to put in all the effort to do so entirely on their own.

I hope this was helpful to get you started in your research to show that the situation wrt PieFed is nowhere close to being as bad as people have presented it to be (though certainly far from ideal, and at its core still somewhat valid in that it is quite opinionated software and becoming more so all the time), nor is the situation wrt to Lemmy all sunshine and rainbows and anywhere close to being as free of censorship as people make it out to be (though in the end it does manage to keep its politics out of the software better, hence someone may choose to place their hopes into it as a better option in the future to maintain freedom of speech).

I don’t get the opinionated part; aren’t we all? Yes, some project theirs more onto others than the rest. Personally, I see myself as humanly common-sense moderate. I used to be a political hot-head, which meant I cheered certain people I wouldn’t touch with a pole these days. I tend to avoid stupid people and situations as I mature.