A big part of discord's target community is gaming/gamers. One of the features it provides is the ability to livestream the game you are playing and view streams of games others are playing.
Definitely not my area, but I wouldn't be surprised if streaming some game with an overlay would require 3d acceleration to not suck.
It reminds me of the age of Windows bloatware.
Trying to pile all the ingredients on a single piece of bread does not a good sandwich make. On the contrary, it leaves me with an impression that they have to rely on the brand recognition and snowball effect of previous products.
I would probably hold their software in higher regard if it wasn’t just one monolithic multi-tool. They don’t even have to push multiple apps, but could use a modular architecture at the app level with plug-ins to support non-core functionality.
It is not a good user or server owner experience to have to manage multiple applications depending on feature. You can turn off 3d acceleration, if I understand correctly.
On the other side of the multiple app token, Microsoft doesn’t build out PowerPoint, Word, and Excel as a single monolithic Office app.
And I’m pretty sure that’s among the most commercially successful consumer software in the history of computing.
But it's hard to split it much more finely, and two in one isn't going very hard into bloatware. And I like the integration between the two.
I would change a lot of things about discord but not so much that part.
Discord was started to solve a big problem: how to communicate with friends around the world while playing games online.[1]
That said, maybe it’s not the app for you. I totally get why someone would want a single-purpose tool - that’s generally the way I go and I’m not crazy about discord personally having used it a lot, written bots for etc. It’s not reasonable to criticise them for making different decisions from the ones you would make when they are going for a goal that you don’t share.