[wtallis]

That's a reasonable take to an extent, but underlying all of that is the assumption that Meshtastic should be trying to scale up to support hundreds or thousands of active nodes on a single mesh. Since that's clearly almost impossible to achieve with an ad-hoc network of low-power LoRa radios, it's not entirely fair to criticize Meshtastic for not inventing a revolutionary solution to a very hard problem.

It would be more fair to criticize Meshtastic for not being clear enough about the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a low-speed ad-hoc mesh network, and for not actively encouraging people to seek other hardware and software if their use cases are not well-matched to what Meshtastic hardware is capable of. A one size fits all solution simply isn't possible, and Meshtastic can't be the right answer for everyone.

[threemux]

This is also a fair response, however I'd argue that the current architecture, far from supporting hundreds or thousands, won't even support dozens in a small area with meaningful traffic being exchanged (e.g., not just heartbeats and routing data). The solutions exist and no revolutionary approach is needed. That's the crux of the complaints.

Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing, but I don't even see a movement to switch over to something more robust.

[wtallis]

> Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing,

I'd argue it's everything. A network architecture that requires serious fixed infrastructure should probably be an entirely separate project from the ad-hoc mesh formed solely by cheap battery-powered portable/handheld gadgets. And everyone should be realistic about what "meaningful traffic" is for a network with a default data rate of ~1kbps; it's not reasonable to expect that to support the kind of chatter a busy IRC server would see.