XEP-0136 was pretty complex, and didn't see that much adoption.

XEP-0313 is a modern replacement, focusing on just the things that people actually need. It's implemented in many servers and clients already (see https://www.zash.se/mam.html ). It's still under development, but it's already in active use by many people.

Great, there's even two extensions on it!

This is why nobody wants to touch XMPP with a ten-foot pole.

So either XMPP is bad because it hasn't changed for years and is therefore old, or else XMPP is bad because there's new replacements for stuff that didn't work so well.

Honestly, there's some days I wonder if there's any way to win.

Pretty much this. Openfire for instance only recently had XEP-0136 implemented across the board on the server side. In the meanwhile I couldn't find a single client with decent support for chat archiving (XEP-0136) on the client side. Not one (and I really looked).

What? Openfire has had XEP-0136 for literally years. I think a little over a decade, actually. It's only recently implemented XEP-0313.

Hi Dave, firstly thanks for all the hard work on Openfire over the years, very much appreciated.

Secondly regarding XEP-0136 support in OF. I did state that Openfire has only recently had 'XEP-0136 implemented across the board'.

Whilst the Open Archive plugin which provided support is a fine piece of work it was an incomplete implementation with only 1-to-1 chats (no group chat support).

I worked on merging the monitoring and open archive plugins to provide support for both MUC and 1-to-1 using XEP-0136. That work was only fully finished a couple years ago in 2013 so think my comment's still accurate.