The crypto highly annoys me too and I was against it, but we can turn it off and nothing changes which is good. I still believe the dev time should have gone elsewhere. But I’m not as bothered as I was in the begining. Same with stories, never used it before signal in other platforms and had to study wtf they were when it appeared on signal. Now I can see and understand a bit of the use case but I have never seen any of my dozens of friends that use signal use that feature. Still something that can be turned off. I’ve used it to share memes.
Anyway, they claimed heavily that there were markets that would absolutely require that feature since people are used to it in other chat platforms, and if it really brings people to a better platform that is signal I’m ok with it. What I’d really like to see is if the claim now holds true or not and understand if the dev and money time spent in those features really got more users in the app or not and if it was worth the cost vs other features.