Pidgin 3 - Is there any point?

[Eion Robb]

Hi all,

Forgive the clickbaity subject line, but I'm hoping to open some
discussions.

Over the past few years, there's been a few times where I've though "oh,
it'd be good to send a PR to fix up XYZ issue with Pidgin2" but then my
response is "well, I shouldn't do that because everything is going on in
Pidgin3" and then "well, Pidgin3 is a moving target that I'm not personally
using so I can't test my changes, so I better not break things for other
people, so I won't make a PR"

So this got me thinking.....

Is there any real use for users to adopt Pidgin 3?  Is there any "killer
feature" that means they should want to give up on Pidgin 2 and get
mass-adoption of the new and shiny, or are we just making work for the sake
of work, and breaking everything in the process?

Because right now, the way I see it from a user perspective is:

*Pros*:    Gtk3 (does this even matter?), possible pro: "v/v on windows"
*Cons*:   All my plugins/themes/customisations don't work

So I want to ask everyone else's opinions....

Have we shot ourselves in the foot, trying to clean up the code without any
actual end-user-benefit?
Is Pidgin3 the next "PHP6"?
Are we better off focusing our efforts on Pidgin 2 and merge in all the
plugins/hacks/workarounds that people have made, to improve it?
Or, do we need to release a Pidgin2 plugin loader that can load the "100
most popular plugins" for Pidgin3 to be usable and have a safe transition
process?

Thoughts, comments, criticisms? :)

Cheers,
Eion
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