From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.
They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..
Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).
The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.
As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.
If you are going to have the setup and work of repeater nodes though doesnt something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense?
With Meshtastic/Meshcore you are open to scenarios like "a repeater on a boat, large group scattered across large marina, nearby town and hiking areas". Or "bigger family skiing in a large resort". You can get insane distances with great reliability if you place a node strategically on the highest point around. And it costs around $100 to buy an (off the shelf) solar node that can run close to 24/7. Some folks out there have amazing use cases in the mountains.
> something that gives actual network use between devices make more sense
There are plenty of Meshcore/Meshtastic independent devices. With keyboards or touch controls and all.
Indeed, but when talking to friends who find Meshtastic / Meshcore interesting we often also talk about Reticulum as it has some overlaps and is an interesting project.