@silverpill @icedquinn @fish @sampler @p @strypey @light The Fediverse part I care about does not include Mastodon as I've said above. I loose almost nothing if they stop federating tomorrow. So if they want to split from me into some normie mainstream network, their loss, I didn't care anyway. This Fediverse will continue to exist and arguably be better without them.
But to answer your question properly in the perspective of someone helping with server development and not a user, I've been vocal about the issues with new proposals as you've probably seen many times already and I will continue to do so. But it's not like someone at Mastodon actually cares about criticism, they are the GNOME of this network. W3C is a different beast and so far has been focused on things nobody cares about (C2S and OAuth2 discovery for C2S). If they decide to do something stupid, like pushing more JSON-LD, I've been also vocal about that, but not like I can do much than that when Evan blocked me over the grant disagreement and he's mostly the one running the show.
@a is the only one sane there even with the JSON-LD enthusiasm. So far they only introduced E2EE which is still half-baked and not a proper spec anyway (key distribution is missing completely), while being something very few will care about I think. If you want E2EE messaging, just use XMPP or one of the other 5+ apps for it.
If incompatibilities arise, like the quotes one, they will get fixed eventually like I've done previously with other servers. The quote issue has been very down on my list of things to do and I didn't have a good idea of how to fix the UX, so that's why I didn't touch it at all. But if the incompatibilities are too big, at some point you have to stop making excuses for the bully and just cut them off. They can't act like the sole arbitrator of the network/protocol and everyone keep bowing to them. In that way, the hidden quotes is a similar hijack to what they did with the subject/description field. Taking what they made and altering it to something they don't want.
At worst, you can always take ap-next, add some FEPs, strip JSON-LD and call it LitePub 1.0.