A lot of updates recently, seeming to move away from photo-sharing at the center

Wow, lots of changes/updates! One of them being the removal of the "Journal" where site updates were published. Bummer.

Seems there's a shift away from the "share your photos" core, to a more "photography for beginners" and product portal. That's going to take some getting used to.

One thing I wanted to bring up. It may be a pet peeve exclusive to me, but personally I deeply dislike clicking on an image that is interesting, and not going straight to said image, but rather to a catalog of images (which may or may not even have the image I clicked on showing), which is what one of the recent changes does. Now, instead of showing a collection of images per category (which you could click on to see the larger version), I am fed "Category" tiles, and if I click on the image, I get sent to that category, which often doesn't even show the (random) image that I clicked on. To me that's pretty frustrating (I hope you are fine with this direct feedback).