If they're trying to kill third party apps, why do you think the solution is making essentially a third party app? Even if you go the web scraping route, I guarantee if this actually gets any traction Reddit will start making subtle semi-randomized changes to their DOM to make scraping as difficult as possible.
They want you on Reddit's app and site to show you ads. They will make it as hard as they can to avoid them.
The only realistic solution is to build communities here to replace the ones on Reddit.