I would much prefer to do Reticulum but that is a little bit more involved (although on my list as I believe it is a better project in my opinion). As for Meshtastic and Meshcore, which both focus on chat. Meshcore has a higher hop-limit which Madhya stud suffered with. And given the nodes between me and others in Cape Town it would be reached now and then. Meshcore also has a proper routing algorithmn, I think. I see it mentioned path discovery, so that is way more efficient than flooding the network like Meshtastic does. I also like the strict definition of repeater (router) and client which Meshtastic doesn't have (although arguably it has a lot of different modes). @Danie van der Merwe did I miss anything?

Also Meshtastic's hop limit is 7 due to a 3 bit field used for the TTL