Meshtastic routing is also completely broken.
I am curious about that.
What is in particular broken ?
Any reason why Meshtastic is not using a well specified / tested a mesh aware routing protocol like BATMAN [1] ?
I also don't think it's possible to make Meshtastic into the kind of reliable and high-performance mesh network some users want without effectively dropping support for most battery-powered devices by requiring much more frequent transmissions to maintain connectivity and participation in the mesh.
Interesting.
Zigbee has this distinction between router node and non-router node.
Routers are active members of the mesh (relay). Non-routers are just clients.
Most battery devices in Zigbee acts generally as non-router.
It is surprising that Meshtastic did not follow this pattern. Zigbee is not a young protocol.