I think that financial and technical status are essentially divorced. Good that they're getting money, but on the technical side, it's a rambling disaster.
TB has had the embarrassing Mork backend for ages (took around 14 years to fix; it's not in the released version yet). And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window!
Even ignoring the above, the addons compatibility keeps breaking. AFAIK that's a necessity, but as an end-user, the result is an increased alienation from the product.
Ultimately, Thunderbird without addons is an unremarkable product.
> And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window!
Switching between windows is easy using alt-tab. Switching tabs requires one to do something like ctrl-pgup/pgdown or alt-number if you know the tab number. Personally, I think using alt-tab is a lot easier to switch between the compose and overview windows.
TB has had the embarrassing Mork backend for ages (took around 14 years to fix; it's not in the released version yet). And the codebase is so tangled that nobody has been able to convert the email writing window into a tab. One window!
Even ignoring the above, the addons compatibility keeps breaking. AFAIK that's a necessity, but as an end-user, the result is an increased alienation from the product.
Ultimately, Thunderbird without addons is an unremarkable product.