Gemini may unfortunately be the best hope in terms of what gets adoption but I feel like it swings way too far in the other direction. I see this a lot: your choices are either massively obese or minimalist to a fault. Where is the middle ground? From an engineering perspective, I think that is the most interesting area: designing something that is small and simple yet surprisingly capable. That is also what I want from software as a user.

I think Gemini goes in the "weekend project" category whereas a modern browser is more like hundreds of man-years. I evaluated Gemini, wanted to like it, almost like it, but I think it just doesn't allow me to do what I want to do. It is too simple.

I think it should be possible to design something that is more flexible, yet for which a competent programmer can write a basic client implementation in a few weekends (with some features missing but the client still being entirely usable), make it feature-complete in an additional dozen weekends or so, and also add & finish all the extras and fluff and polish over the remaining year. From there on it's maintenance and bugfixes and minor features which can be worked on as a hobby by a small group without having to devote all their lives to it. These projects are also small enough that if someone's not happy, they can fork and customize (and still be able to "keep up" with whatever developments might happen in terms of standardised functionality).