The primary thing is rather than “dumb” flood routing, you can choose the path your message takes to its destination; as a repeater operator you can also choose the path it takes to repeat out. Its a slight compensation to people carelessly placing infrastructure nodes with poor configurations in poor places. Not perfect, but better. Adoption is much, much lower though, and the licensing is not copyleft.

Meshcore does address some of the biggest shortfalls of Meshtastic, but I absolutely HATE that they’re positioned to either rugpull, or setup a perpetual “freemium” model. It’s also not interoperable, so if Meshcore is to work, it needs the numbers like Meshtastic has.

Yeah, so far the most prevalent thing around my area has been “it’s a hobby for the sake of being a hobby.” No one does anything terribly useful or important with it. I can tell you that I would certainly never rely on it as a form of emergency communication.