Note that when I say the "community" here, I don't necessarly mean you or people close to the project, but I rather refer to what I've been seeing here internally, when talking to people at meetups, twitter, etc.

In the early days, the average Redux user was someone who had been burnt by Backbone or Angular 1.x state management, was excited about the solution Redux provided, was curious about Redux's FP characteristic or more rarely might even have been an FP zealot. There was a lot of chat around that area, how to handle specific problems from that angle.

As time went on and it became very popular, the "community" (I use the term loosely, as there's no single entity representing "the community") grew, and the typical Redux user was very much the same as the average JS dev. Usually a OO background or familiar with more classical languages and patterns. Just want to get shit done and doesn't care about the Redux pattern's unique characteristic. Uses Redux because everyone else is, not because they see value in the event sourcing-like decoupling.

A lot of things come from that. Like already mentioned, the focus came a lot more to "how to I reduce boilerplate", "waah I dont like passing props down", "code reuse!", "how do I make things look like my familiar OOP patterns".

That's all valuable and I don't want to downplay it (there's only so much nuance I can put in a stack overflow post), but a lot of this is available in other tools and other frameworks. MobX and state trees are pretty nice. I can just use that.

Redux itself has a few things others have not:

1- Popularity, but that's a completely artificial thing. Any other pattern could become popular. It does mean it has the most complete ecosystem, but we can replicate anything elsewhere if we need to.

2- FP-ish, Elm-esque, event sourcing-like characteristics. Nothing even remotely mainstream outside of other languages (Elm, PureScript, ReasonML) have this. But there's very little effort these days in tapping into it.

For example, the "connect all the things everywhere!" makes the predictable dataflow aspect of Redux a lot more fuzzy. In large apps we don't have much choice though: there are major perf issues if you don't connect deep enough. It's a problem that can be solved, but I've never seen it solved. Redux being used as a glorified context container to save on typing can be solved with better design patterns. There's very little research done in that area anymore, so it's here to stay. Side effects being handled by thunks/epics/sagas works fine, but we could do better. Back then there was a LOT of research and attempts done in that area (remember redux-loop? I miss redux-loop. The syntax sucked. Can't we do better, several years later in a world of generators, async/await and observables? I bet we can!).

The obsession in making Redux, a functional event sourcing like-thing into something palatable to the average developer is just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. There's nothing unique about Redux to make it appeal to those use cases and sub community. What if we looked at Redux, and instead of only focusing on that, we pushed what makes it unique to it's limits?

After all, back when the first Redux demo and timetravel debugging was shown, the world revolved around OOP JavaScript. It pushed people out of their comfort zone a little.

I'd show you the code we write here, but with hundreds of devs, they learn from the same place everyone else do. As we've grown, all the patterns (and anti-patterns) you see everywhere are also present in our own code, and we fight these battles internally too.

I'd be more than happy to chat more, but to me, that was always a battle that was lost years ago, when discussions devolved into "ivory tower vs pragmatism" (remember http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/01/idiomatic-redux-tho... ?)

This really isn't a form of discussion I feel is productive. To join force within a problem space and solve problems in that space, you need several people aligned on a common goal. The problem space and common goal I'm interested in isn't "How do we make Redux work for everyone", it's "given an assumption that certain FP patterns, event sourcing, global state and event logs are high value patterns, how do we solve real world problem with them". I'm not sure this is possible anyore without alienating tens of thousands of frontend developers, without starting something else from scratch.

Edit: phew I hit enter and didn't even realize how much I wrote.

So TL;DR. You and the rest of the team are doing a fine job, but as with all things that are popular, there are "sub communities", and its impossible to make everyone happy. My pie in the sky dream is for people that don't like Redux to use something else, and for Redux to focus on its strength instead of always trying to fight its (by design) weaknesses.