That is surprisingly close to what I'd expected. I'd heard talk from one of the devs maintaining Hangouts for Android that there was a lot of technical debt in

That is surprisingly close to what I'd expected. I'd heard talk from one of the devs maintaining Hangouts for Android that there was a lot of technical debt in the project, which is part of the reason progress on improving it had slowed down to a crawl. I guess my main problem is that the protocols are being tossed away and the continual rebranding. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence, even if the underlying tech is solid. It's one thing to have that probabilistic development going on underneath the surface, but once it bubbles up to a certain level, somebody has to have their eyes on the big picture, and there's little evidence of that, at least as far as messaging goes. I think that's what's missing here.