The goal with this post is mainly getting a sense of the community's feelings regarding the current state of the Grid and finding alternatives to it.
Grid 3.0 was announced around two years back while Grid 2.0 is now barely functional and riddled with even more bugs than it was previously (Ikonboard not updating correctly, Kwiki errors) and we're currently in the Decker Dark Ages where GM hand-holding is put off because 'Grid 3.0 is arriving soon' (a senior staff member told me this a long time ago while I toyed with the idea of doing something hacky outside of coded possibilities, if that has changed, consider me corrected). Is Grid 3.0 too much of an undertaking? Only one coder is available to work on the project and they have their life to live, so understandably progress is slow, and that's absolutely fine, this is a free game with real people behind it who gets paid jack shit to provide us the playerbase with a fun experience.
It's getting to the point where people who play the decker archetype, an incredibly important cornerstore in any cyberpunk media, realize that they are utterly useless codedly. And yes, style over substance, that applies to all archetypes, but if the only way to shoot someone with a pistol after investing a lot of UE into the skill was to xhelp a staff member and ask for help, nobody would want to play a solo.
We can't rush Grid 3.0 development, and Grid 2.0 is barely seeing any use as far as I'm aware. It's largely ignored. A faster and somewhat dirtier approach to the situation would be to just scrap Grid 2.0 and 3.0 completely. If an in-game alternative with little of the bells and whistles but actual utility took its place I don't think many people would shed any tears over having the 'Grid' in-client instead of in a pop-up window. As far as I'm aware several staffers have experience with in-client coding and the project would be able to move along at a much quicker rate.
So my goal with this post is mainly to see if the community prefers the history element of Grid 2.0/3.0 (old forum threads with IC info, news articles, old nodes etc) over the utility an in-client 'internet' system. Of course there is no reason why the history couldn't be archived and still available IC somewhere.
What's your take? Is Grid 3.0 worth the wait, or would an alternative to the amibitious system be preferable?