I like the approach Snikket is taking. It's not reinventing the wheel. XMPP, which is very well tested, robust, lightweight and has proven it can be extended for new usages as the world evolves throughout the years. With OMEMO for robust, secure and private E2EE. Built on top of existing popular server (Prosody) and clients (Conversations and Siskin) and contributing back to upstream. All with a consistent branding for easier adoption by non techies. I wish it was more popular so that it coul get more funding, collaborators and a larger ecosystem for easy deployment of servers etc.
I wish all the effort that was spent towards building the bloated, complex and complicated Matrix would have been spent extending XMPP further, building more servers, clients and gateways.