Agreed. The architecture diagram [1] describes a flow that is identical to how a user on Ripple buys IOUs from a gateway, trades or spends them with other users, and how a receiver redeems them with the gateway for the original currency.

Ripple captured my attention for years, but its backing company has taken it in a direction of commercial adoption which is good for them, but antithetical to the applications I was excited about.

If GNU Taler is going to revive that vision, then that's really exciting!

[1] https://taler.net/en/architecture.html