The subreddit isn't the place where MT development happens - it's where users discuss stuff they do. If there was the occasional discussion of MC vs MT, that would be very healthy and helpful for both projects. But this is not what happens. The sub drowns in toxic flamewars. There's nothing to be learned from that in terms of development, and the subreddit just becomes noise i.e. spam.

Re: licensing, last thing I read was the MC was... at least awkward: a "core" being "open", and then some "modules" that you need to pay for (to run on your device). I don't really care for a project like this, even if they backpaddled from this scenario. I'd rather wait for yet another third option, that is free open source and would have the supposed protocol improvements.

The good thing is, after all, that the same LoRa radio devices can be flashed with one or the other, if I understood correctly.

I think both the Meshcore and Meshtastic communities have a problem with people being passive aggressive instead of being direct and upfront about the different tradeoffs chosen by those projects, and their consequences for various use cases. Unless those attitudes improve, keeping the forums separated is unfortunately one of the more straightforward ways to avoid flamewars and repetitive, circular arguments.

There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.