imo despite the level of effort in moving thousands of people from one technology to another, trying out gitter (which has been super receptive to people burned by slack) again is a much lower level of effort than developing a whole new solution with lots of question marks

it's seriously worth considering that gitter might address the needs of this community

also i'll be honest, the walk-up experience to gitter is substantially better than for slack

just the fact that i was able to join without juggling email was a huge plus