They were asking how Matrix is a "terrible steward of the protocol". Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how your comment answers that.

I appreciate you! My family and I made the decision to move off of Discord when they announced their full age verification rollout. We were planning on setting up and hosting our own matrix server, but now I'd like to know more about Element's poor stewardship of the protocol.

My tech level is literate layperson, not working in tech and without a background in systems administration, networking, or software development. I can understand the larger concepts pretty readily but get lost in the finer details like why data architects would choose one setup over another. I'm content knowing that someone good at this made a reasoned choice without needing them to explain why as long as I still get to laugh at Bastard Operator from Hell stories.

The results I found last night were things like The Register talking about matrix being adopted more and more around the world, including at the government and military levels, a competing service or two telling off Element for bad practices or poor use of the protocol, and Element's rebuttal (which basically came down to "our configuration doesn't need to be everybody's configuration, THAT'S THE POINT" and "it's a limitation you have, too, do you really want to make this a thing?"). It's good to be aware of, but it's not what I'm looking for. All this involves the paid services side; does anybody have any sourced news on the ongoing development of matrix from, say, the past 3-5 years?

Have you checked out https://commet.chat/ ? It's supposed being the discord UI stuff for Matrix