Worth noting that two of the people fairly heavily quoted on the shortcomings of XMPP both serve on the XMPP technical Council at the moment. (One of them is me, the other is Philipp Hancke).

That is interesting. My initial guess would be one of the two:

(a) it's improved remarkably and such short comings don't exist

(b) it won in adoption, it's getting all the labor, and you two are simply trying to improve it on the technical council.

I'm going with (b) for now. Was I right? Or is XMPP now efficient, easy to understand, and easy to implement?

Actually a mixture. Some shortcomings have vanished because while they're problems, they're solved problems. And adoption etc, too.

I'd note that I was never against XMPP, though; I just don't see the need to pretend it's perfect. I do, however, object when problems are claimed for it that it doesn't have.

Makes sense. Is there an up-to-date reference on the problems it currently has? I'm not talking whatever technical papers or submissions to committees. More an article like the one I cited.

So did you implement PSYC instead?

No. I already had a reliable communication system over UDP. I tweaked it with some stuff from PSYC and elsewhere. Let me achieve needed goals without doing a whole PSYC system. Had I needed full XMPP alternative I might have built PSYC just to see what would happen.