@timbuck2themoon
Matrix apps are far from perfect, but its dev community at least care about improving HX and it shows. In my experience, the XMPP dev community (with a few notable exceptions like the ModernXMPP folks) insist on seeing their HX fails as features not bugs. They expect people to stop expecting 21st century chat apps, and embrace 1990s retro.
I've used XMPP since then (I'm still strypey@jabber.org), and all I can say is, good luck with that.