There's a tradeoff between collision resistance and fingerprint string length. We chose MD5 because people are comfortable with it in ssh, it's a shorter string

There's a tradeoff between collision resistance and fingerprint string length. We chose MD5 because people are comfortable with it in ssh, it's a shorter string to verify than something like SHA-256, and because we planned to make your peer's entire public key base64 available if you really wanted to go that extra mile (currently not available). What would you prefer personally: (1) MD5 fingerprint for convenience AND entire peer public key base64 available if you really want; vs (2) just a longer SHA-256 fingerprint.