Having looked at things like this before (including Meshtastic) the thing that stuck out to me about Reticulum is that it’s carrier-agnostic. LoRa is cool, but being able to extend the network over arbitrary channels sounds very appealing.
Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator type device at some point though, and yes, that’s probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point. (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too which I’ve thought about playing around with.)
A nice compatible routing protocol does not help when people have a mix of LoRa, commodity 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi as the physical layer. And then add in more esoteric stuff like 3.6GHz CBRS, 433MHz NPR-70, 900MHz Ubiquiti radios or new 802.11ah sub-1GHz radios.
And realistically I suspect that people using it for the same sort of use cases they’d use Meshtastic for will be using the same LILYGO (and similar) hardware.