>They merely made the algorithm more balanced to showcase some of the smaller sites

By... Filtering out r/The_Donald. You can claim the reason was apolitical. Fine. But I think you have to be extremely naive to do so, given what was going on on reddit during the elections.

>And the defaults are not political at all:

Some are not, some are. All that are, are aligned with the admins' political view and routinely ban users that disagree with them.