So if they work, they should have been added to the distro. This is hardly any work and people were asked since FIVE years many times to do so. If nobody felt willing to take this little effort over 5 years, this speaks a lot about their engagement and help for the project.
The loss of support for the 1.x bindings at this time will result in a significant loss of users and potentially maintainers as well
Keeping up complexity will PREVENT maintainers from joining/staying with the project, so it’s hard to tell, which side is more relevant in the long run. Fact is, in 5 years time nobody ever took care of the compat layer but me. It’ll be interesting to see, which developers will jump to the rescue the next time it breaks and I don’t fix it. Let’s try that out. I am not very confident, though. A funny experience were the last 2-3 weeks: While hundreds of people had opinions and spent a massive time on discussions, nobody seemed to care about the fact that we had no working snapshot distro and I was more or less the only one chasing bugs and regressions… Pretty frustrating, really. So whatever you discuss, please always consider the situation where I might not be available and others have to keep the project running - that’s why I focus so much to make it easy for others, because otherwise it could be an instant death.
Ultimately I think we either need to come up with a way to make the OH 1.x bindings work on the new core
I don’t agree that it has to be “on the new core”. I think @David_Graeff made a great suggestion about it: A feature to connect multiple openHAB instances would be cool for distributed setups (and to allow this was a design goal of the openHAB architecture 10 years ago already) - so if that would be easily possible, you can run a 2.x instance with all 1.x legacy stuff and connect it to a lean and modern 3.x instance to have everything working seemlessly as one setup. Makes imho a lot of sense and I think it’d be great if @David_Graeff would work extending the MQTT support that way.