Somewhat related thread from the past days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999636 that also discusses Reticulum which is an interesting project in the same space too.

From what I could see the general vibe seems to be shifting from meshtastic to meshcore.io in the past months.

It's a natural direction to hop from Meshtastic to Meshcore.io as the community grows.

They are implemented a bit differently. The chatty nature of Meshtastic works very well in small groups, or unknown area, when you need to talk a bunch of your friends scattered during a trip, to monitor your tracktors on a large field, etc..

Then you try to scale it to a larger city and it just completely breaks. Then Meshcore.io enters the picture. Every larger community that switches says the same - it's a huge reliability difference. It also comes at a cost of some discipline and more infrastructure planning (repeater nodes).

The more I play with both the more I respect both projects.

As for Reticulum, I don't see it competing in the same category at all. It has much higher aspirations, but also it seems at the moment it's much less practical and popular.