If the reticulum code is worse than the meshtastic one, then it is truly atrocious. Been trying to get a specific board to simply "sleep" its radio using meshtastic, and nobody seems to know WHY it doesnt do it. The code is horrible spaghetti with lots of ifdefs. And nobody seems to know why things are the way they are in the code re: power handling. ChatGPT wrote me a brute force method that works, but its ugly and I dont want to maintain patches.
But it is fairly easy to hack on. I have no idea how to debug things without USB serial connected, though.
Sorry, can't really compare because I've never had to suffer looking at meshtastic source code. Quite tempted at this point to just throw the python implementation of reticulum at Claude and see if a validated port to C++ is possible.
Maybe a bit offtopic and not LoRa, but I've been looking at ESP32 and they include an ESPMesh for the WiFi radio with a promise of about 500 to 1000 meters range from what I read. It isn't the same range as LoRa, but it is "larger" bandwidth and for the price of 3 dollars per unit seems promising on urban areas to connect people. I'm trying it out now.
But it is fairly easy to hack on. I have no idea how to debug things without USB serial connected, though.