Everything beyond 1 Hop is often unusable. The public chat room only sees fragments of discussions. This causes big frustration within the community.
MT clients are just too chatty. That most Roles can act as a (delayed) Router was IMHO a bad design decision.
Also that they blocked the term "Meshcore" on their Reddit Sub leaves a bad taste. Both projects share similar problems - they should cooperate instead of fight each other.
Hopefully MT catches up. Their GPLv3 license is much more attractive to me than the MC MIT.
Re: licensing, last thing I read was the MC was... at least awkward: a "core" being "open", and then some "modules" that you need to pay for (to run on your device). I don't really care for a project like this, even if they backpaddled from this scenario. I'd rather wait for yet another third option, that is free open source and would have the supposed protocol improvements.
The good thing is, after all, that the same LoRa radio devices can be flashed with one or the other, if I understood correctly.
There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.
the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.
Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.
Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?
How exciting!
Meshtastic is a bad protocol developed by toxic people in way over their heads.
Beware of using their trademark! They’ll send you a cease and desist letter.
Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215
I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.
I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.
To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.
"Thought experiments about mesh networking"
"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"
"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"
Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."
Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.