[moffkalast]

Well there is one thing that ROS 2 does better, you can declare params directly inside nodes and reconfigure them all without building extra config files. And it doesn't stop working if your local IP changes.

But the rest are firmly downgrades all around. It's slower (rclpy is catastrophically bad), more demanding (CPU usage is through the roof to do DDS packet conversions), less reliable (the RMWs are a mess), less compatible (armhf is kill). The QoS might count as an improvement for edge cases where you need UDP for point clouds, but what it mostly does on a day to day basis is create a shit ton of failure cases where there's QoS incompatibility between topics and things just refuse to connect. It's lot more hassle for no real gain.

[causal]

Config generally feels more complex though, since there isn't a central parameter server anymore. The colcon build system also just feels more complex now, which I thought was already impressively complex with catkin.

[moffkalast]

Yep it takes super long to get parameters from all nodes cause you need to query each one instead of the DDS caching it or something.

And yeah I forgot, there's the added annoying bit where you can't build custom messages/services with python packages, only ament_cmake can do it so you often need metapackages for no practical reason. And the whole deal with the default build mode being "copy all" so you need to rebuild every single time if you don't symlink, and even that often doesn't work. The defaults are all around impressively terrible, adding extra pitfalls in places where there were none in ROS 1.

[ModernMech]

It does a lot of things better but it also does a lot of things worse and also doesn't fix a lot of the real problems with ROS as a system.