Sorry you feel that way about Prosody. If you have specific feedback we're always looking to improve the setup experience.
Snikket (briefly mentioned in the post) is an attempt to bundle everything you need for a modern communication server into a single package (e.g. automatic certs and stuff that you need for audio /video) out of the box. Maybe it sounds like it would suit you more.
My criticism is about XMPP in general and its ecosystem.
I stopped my XMPP server a few years ago, Dino was still in its infancy. It's good to see that the client is reaching some maturity but then, looking at the supported XEPs I can see that MAM is not supported for group chats:
- https://github.com/dino/dino/wiki/Supported-XEPs
Fortunately Matrix and the respective clients have been evolving quite well, so I don't see the need of going back to XMPP.
And that's without talking about the elephant in the room of iOS. 5 years ago my workplace moved from XMPP to mattermost. There was a list of features desired by people; 7/8 could have been solved by updating ejabberd and telling people to switch clients, but iOS support meant switching away.