The protocol itself is more mature than the maintainer situation suggests. I built a complete independent implementation from the public spec in a few sessions. If one person can do that without touching the reference codebase, the foundation is solid. The risk is to Mark's implementation, not to Reticulum as a protocol.
That's good to hear. Having a proper protocol is the hardest and most important part. If everyone agrees on the protocol, different implementations can exist, forks can compete, and we get all the benefits of such without network fragmentation.