It's both true than Dovecot is an elegantly designed piece of software and the protocoles surrounding email are a complete mess with decades of bolted on additi

It's both true than Dovecot is an elegantly designed piece of software and the protocoles surrounding email are a complete mess with decades of bolted on additions and a most used implementation - Gmail - which likes to do things in peculiar ways. I think the complaints you see here are entirely legitimate. Anyone having been doing this job long enough knows that designing good protocoles is insanely hard and exemples of poorly designed ones in the commercial world abound. It would have been more surprising for the feediverse to get that entirely right than the reverse. I say that while agreeing with the original comment which points out that a good implementation should solely focus on the specification and leave everything else to the clients.