However MeshCore makes one fundamental choice which is severely limiting. It uses a single LoRa discriminator and channel for all nodes. That said, LoRa limitations pretty much force this choice.

This, limits a typical network (3 repeaters) to about 500 messages/hour. The throughput scales inversely by how many repeaters you can hear.

The code does try to adjust down the TX power of a repeater in repeater-dense networks, which probably helps keep throughput consistent for a while.

For these things to work at scale they either need something other than LoRa (which is quite novel, but limited) or they need to figure out how to use LoRa in a way which allows for more channelization.

Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.