I think the scope of the project is “federated social media” in a very broad sense. I think the limits of the feature richness should be bounded by how many people want to bother implementing. I think we should aim to put Twitter and Facebook to shame in terms of feature-richness, and in a lot of ways we’ve accomplished that as-is, but I think we should be doubling down on it. I think that removing features should be reserved for cases where they actively create problems, real ones, ones that no sane person could characterize as “academic.”
I’m currently working on a fork of Rebased, which is in turn a fork of Pleroma. However, if we’re at an impasse on this topic because of a fundamental philosophical difference on what this ultimately ought to be, I’m likely going to formalize my fork instead of just it being my personal fork.