Very interesting timing guys.
The team behind Fast DDS is pretty easy to reach if you have a reproducible problem. Why didn’t you post an issue? I don’t see any real questions here. Many users do meet us and comment with us on their architectures. Why didn’t you try that channel? Github? call us?
With Foxy, Galactic, and now Humble, we have around 50K clones per month of our main Fast DDS repo. Also, our commercial customers are growing at a steady rate. We have many users, and most of them, either using ROS 2 or DDS directly, are happy users.
Unfortunately, in some cases we can have a bug, or other implementations could perform better for specific use cases. Because in middleware, all the decisions have a trade-off, and sure we are not the best for all potential use cases.
Currently, the process to select the RMW default is a transparent one: Technical Reports and a vocation by the members of the TSC, all of them heavy users of ROS 2 and big contributors. @smac thinks cyclone is better, and he probably voted for cyclone. But we have also very heavy users of ROS 2 in favor of Fast DDS, using ROS 2 and Fast DDS in production systems and commercial robots, and we won the votation. And I like that: Votes based on reproducible technical arguments and unbiased measurements, and democracy.
My team is very open to discussing any discovery scenarios. We even have a really large study on scalability you can check here:
Fast DDS Discovery Mechanisms Analysis
If you want solutions, discuss technically your scenario, have a meeting with us, etc. It is easy to find us. Just drop me a message. Or if you want a public discussion, a reproducible issue is a good starting point. We are always willing to improve our implementation.