You mean OTR? 1. OTR is some old hack and not really usable 2. OTR has nothing to do with XMPP at all

OMEMO only really needs XEP-0163, the thing which also gives you avatars and such, supported nearly anywhere. There is some problem that you can't access the key of someone who did not add you yet to the contact list on older implementations [1] but that does not make it unusable.

> I am not inclined to positively review a chat protocol that frequently fails to deliver messages.

XMPP delivers, if you encrypt them with the wrong key it can do nothing about.

[1] https://gultsch.de/omemo_by_default.html

While I agree with your pain points, I would not say XMPP that the protocol isn't any good.

- Pidgin: Just take a look at their bug tracker. You will not have any problems finding tickets requesting essential features which are 6 years and older (e.g. Message Archive Management). So unless the Pidgin devs get some done I would not use their client (Gajim is a much better alternative, especially since the 1.0 release last year).

- ejabberd OMEMO: Actually, I don't know what the ejabberd devs were thinking when they changed their default config to disable OMEMO. They told something about having a hard time tracking down issues with OMEMO enabled. Well, kinda makes sense from a developers perspective, but given the fact that OMEMO is end-to-end encryption, I wonder what they were expecting. Nevertheless, disabling OMEMO by default on the server is just a stupid idea.

- message delivery: I had problems with that too, but ultimately it was just a problem with some ejabberd setting (I think it was mod_stream_mgmt: resend_on_timeout: if_offline) [1].

[1] https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/configuration/#mod-stream-mgm...

> Xmpp is a disaster, I have otp enabled and all too often messages are delivered to the wrong machine, but encrypted with a different key, so it is pure garbage and lost forever.

What part of XMPP is doing that? I think you're talking about a bug in an implementation of XMPP not the protocol itself. Its like saying you go to an address and get the wrong website. Hard to blame an issue like that on HTTP rather than a server or a client that implements it.

I have prosody running on my Debian stable server, conversations on mobile/android and gajim on PC (Debian stable). Omemo works perfectly, no missed messages, no encryption problems. It just works. Different story a few years ago. The XMPP ecosystem improved a lot.