XMPP felt great when compared to Matrix. Matrix was in a bad state some years ago when I hosted it for a while, and seems like it still is the same messy state. I avoid it as much as possible but for some reason there are communities using it.
At this point it should just die so people would be motivated to replace it with something better.
Which perfectly fits the Matrix ethos of everything constantly being rewritten or replaced with something new that only implements half the features before the original thing is ever finished.
I've had only one issue with ejabberd (didn't read the docs close enough and had to move from mnesia to sql when I hit the size limit) in over a decade of self-hosting it.
Knowing which XEPs you actually want is a bit of a pain, but has gotten easier. Now I usually just periodically look at the current prosody example[1] which lists extensions by "essential" "recommended" "nice to have" and "other" and it's easy enough to find the matching modules for ejabberd.
One of my favourite small features we added in the latest release is a 'prosodyctl check features' command which will validate that your configuration is up to date with current best practices in various ways.
Although we like to curate the default configuration with care, people tend to keep their existing configuration file when they upgrade (we generally recommend this, as we aim for backwards compatibility). The new command makes it easier for folk who upgrade to ensure they are still getting the expected experience as the recommendations evolve.
Obviously that has to be somewhat opinionated. One thing many people appreciate about Prosody is that you can customize it however you want to, even if it's not following the mainstream. E.g. if you really don't care about synchronizing to multiple devices, you can totally disable that message cache. Don't need audio/video calls? Fine!
