I did a test in Romania, #meshtastic vs #meshcore and here is the quick summary:
Over 250 Meshtastic nodes found, compared to 70 Meshcore nodes.
BUT
Meshtastic was basically dead, no one talked, or answered anything. I only got one message with the following - "test"
Compare that to Meshcore, where I got hundreds of messages and people where fast to give me recommendations regarding restaurants and places worth to visit.
The meshcore coverage was also great, with some repeaters on mountain tops (2000 meters high) that connected the bigger cities to each other.
Connection to Bulgaria and Serbia was also working great.
My TL;DR conclusion is that people set up a Meshtastic node, then get bored and forget about it, while people that wants more, and really gets into offgrid-mesh moves over to Meshcore