Ok, making progress...
First of all, there are now 9 articles shown on each index page—easy. I also removed the reading time indicator. More importantly, I've adjusted the type to be a touch smaller, a bit less weighty, and significantly less spaced out.
Regarding the images, that's one area where I disagree, and that goes back to why I had set the type the way it was before to begin with: the audience I'm getting from this particular site is used to reading long-form pieces, but in general large compact paragraphs of small text are off-putting to a web audience. And I get a very balanced split between desktop/tablet/mobile viewers.
A lot of the decisions behind the design trends mentioned have less to do with pure aesthetics and more to do with reacting to how people read on the internet, which is not at all in sync with how print reading works. Much wiser people than I have spent good time and money researching this at scale, so all I'm doing is trying to find a middle ground between their findings, my aesthetic preferences (it is my blog after all), and what my particular audience prefers based on my own analytics.
The whitespace in conjunction with the images made it seem more accessible, and while I have made changes to make the text better, I think large images are a great help to break up the paragraphs and allow for a detailed look at whatever it is that I'm showing. And the analytics seem to bear this out—people like big images.
Anyway, hopefully these tweaks make it a bit more palatable to you fine folks
