I would try to select based on the merits of the project and its adoption instead of drama.
For me the team behind meshtastic needs some help behind their approach to APIs, the app releases frequently break that contract and they probably just need a little help in that area to improve it.
Meshcore sounds compelling to me because it has that fixed vs dynamic target approach which I suspect is more true to the real world given folks are standing up solar powered radios attached to fixed points and then trying to send messages from their phones.
Edit: I guess meshcore isn't really a real project.
the merits of one are largely vibe-coded by one overly enthusiastic guy.
This is wrong.
One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before.
The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.
This is the first I've heard of it so I guess its not a real project then.
It totally is a real project. Their marketing guy tried to take off with the trademark, long story. He's the vibe coder, and is trying to carry on like it's all good while the community went with the actual firmware/client devs.
I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic