Why do I get the feeling that I'm arguing a pointless argument with an LLM? I'm going to put the good-faith effort in for this comment but I'm not going any further.

They can still profit indirectly from providing services etc (which is fine)

Yes, that kind of approach can help ensure that open source projects are sustainably maintained.

But even just the fact that in order to use the word “Meshtastic” ™®© I have to read https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/licensing-and-trademark/ shows that it does not have “community” vibes but “Meshtastic™®© is ours and we’re just letting you use the source code etc for now” vibes

It's open source. You always run the risk that you might have to do a hard-fork of any open source software regardless of who maintains it.

If a specific radio is illegal, it’s easy to just find where it’s transmitting from and fine you; they already do this with pirate radio stations

Yeah, but that's true of virtually all methods of communication. That's a regulatory problem, not a meshtastic or reticulum problem. There is nothing specific about meshtastic/reticulum that makes it resistant to Government censorship. The best you could possibly do with reticulum is stick some messages on a USB drive and pass them to someone else - but then why not just FAT32 format the drive and send your friend some files? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

But why be dependent on 2 companies instead of having the option to buy a radio from any company? Why is competition and diversity bad for an independent and off-grid network that we don’t want it to have a single point of failure? 🤔

I feel like you're arguing in bad faith here. I've been trying to help you understand some of the benefits/drawbacks of Reticulum and Meshtastic, not argue that one is inherently better than the other.

LoRa licenses the technology out. You're not buying the device directly from them. It's a standard, basically an identifiable brand.

Why lock every user into a single technology just because some users want to have a long-lasting battery?

The reason that meshtastic and reticulum are designed primarily to be work over LoRa is because Governments and businesses have done the hard work of setting standards and legislating free and open portions of the spectrum which end-users don't have to pay to use. This opened up the realistic possibility of private medium-to-long range mesh networks existing in the first place.

Also, do you know that Meshtastic uses a queue messaging format which can be routed over UDP/TCP just like reticulum?

(Which btw is probably important for very remote nodes and not the home and portable nodes that I think are more common).

The main first use-case for LoRa was IoT devices where low power is a requirement. Think things like monitoring when gates are open/closed, what the soil temperature is, how much Nitrogen is in soil, etc. I think there are likely waaaay more low power nodes out there than nodes in people's homes.

It's great that you're doing some research and have some ideas that you want to try out, but I think you could probably do with doing a bit more research to shore up your reasoning.

Power efficiency is extremely important for an off-grid network, because it translates more or less directly into battery and especially solar panel area requirements. You need the final node design to be hoistable up the tree.