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In order to support bridges to so many different proprietary platforms Matrix needs to have a superset of their features, so the feature creep is probably intentional. It does make it harder for clients to keep up though.

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Matrix is the opposite of feature creep - there are several features entirely missing from major clients that users of modern chat apps expect to have.

(Examples include: custom emoji, functional search of encrypted chats, pinned messages or some sort of MOTD, forwarding messages, etc)

The matrix developers are experienced IM developers. They've built systems on XMPP and custom protocols before. Their estimate was that because of matrix being federated, every feature was 5-10x harder to implement than in centralized systems.

As a protocol, Matrix has all of these features (custom emoji is a proposal, but many clients implement it).

As a client, Element has all of these (encrypted search only on Desktop for now) other than custom emoji.

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