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1. E2E is a nice to have, not a strict need for me.

2. SMS is miserably useless on some carriers (notably when I had T-Mobile and for my friends still on T-Mobile).

3. MMS is miserably useless, period.

4. International SMS/MMS can be expensive, is more unreliable than domestic, and often unavailable.

Given 2-4, I avoid SMS/MMS as much as possible. Given that E2E is available (WhatsApp, Signal, others), and those services are reliable, available, and useful, I may as well use an E2E system.

The privacy aspects are a great additional feature that they offer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

This is a kind of faulty reasoning that I've been seeing a lot lately, reasoning by majority case. If you receive 999 trivial text messages and then 1 with critical private information then it is still really bad for the defaults to not be private.