I agree, I've tried every possible setup I could to get things running reliably for a client and ultimately just held up my hands and went, "exactly why are you

I agree, I've tried every possible setup I could to get things running reliably for a client and ultimately just held up my hands and went, "exactly why are you not using a combination of Signal/Keybase/GPG" for your use case? Even PGP was easier to adopt en-masse than this.