There's a ton of product manager, designers, and researchers on Hacker News. But looking at his profile seems to indicate that Mr. Clarks a pretty humble guy.
Are you sure? It's better, yes, but it's not a model of UX and on an iPad it seems not much thought was taken into making it a truly universal app. There's a lot of unused space and everything is too large.
The Google+ app with its combo of Path and Flipboard is a much better model to follow. Fast, and it takes advantage of the screen size in both versions.
See http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/ and http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/
So they have the skills, but maybe it's for other reasons they don't follow those practices.