It doesn't surprise me. This is a deep networking problem and very few CS people know anything about networking or how to design clean, fast, low-overhead network protocols and systems.
If IP were designed today the packets would have 500+ bytes of plain text JSON as headers and the spec would support hundreds of extensions.
Have you seen that IPvwhatever proposal from a handful of weeks back that has OAuth/OIDC in packet spec
Is there a better designed mesh project like those two getting built that you know of? Reticulum?