Hi @osheroff,
For those that want the extensibility and access to the existing ecosystem - we have released a Classic Core image that includes all the tooling you’d be used to and is completely compatible with all the Skills you’ve been working on.
We built Dinkum because we wanted to show what was possible with heavily refactored code, and provide the best possible direct user experience when people plug their Mark II in for the first time. We did this “behind closed doors” because we were trying lots of different things and every time we did this publicly there was an outcry that it wasn’t backwards compatible. We tried to explain our intentions the first few times, but honestly, our dev team was able to move far more quickly by hunkering down and just trying things out in private.
Dinkum was made as a fork, precisely because we didn’t want to force this on everyone and it is only written to work on the Mark II. For those like yourself that have written Skills we didn’t want to suddenly force you to port this to a new framework, particularly before we’d really tested it out in the field.
Maybe we should have released Classic Core as the default and provided Dinkum as an optional image? However Dinkum is simply far more stable. So for consumers that aren’t comfortable on the command line it provides the best experience as a voice assistant performing the core functions that we’ve seen people use most.
For yourself, if Classic Core is working well, then I wouldn’t bother porting your Skills to Dinkum. Just grab the Classic Core Sandbox image and away you go.
It’s an interesting point about making trade-off’s between “consumer experience” and “community engagement”. I think I need to sit with that for a bit, but I do hope that we can find a place where as a community we are working toward a better consumer experience together.