Things only need work when they are bad or broken. I don't work on my truck every day. Outside of some simple maintenance every few months, it does what it is supposed to do without any work required from me. If my neighbor is constantly working on his truck I don't assume that his truck is better than mine, I assume it is worse because it requires a lot of work. That's the same way I feel about these clients.
The python client works just fine and occasionally requires some maintenance every few months. Some random person comes along and fixes it rather quickly. A couple of the tabs don't work because they use old PHP stuff that was deleted for whatever reason. I doubt it would take much to get them working with the new API, I can use the API in my web browser so it seems pretty simple, but nobody cares about those tabs anyway. The Java client is constantly getting lots of work because it sucks and still needs a lot of work.
On the topic of client tabs. It seems pretty stupid for these things to even be implemented in the client. It would be most efficient to implement them as web pages. This would make it possible to have replays, mods, maps, and leaderboards on the FAF website without requiring any client. The clients could simply display these pages and the tabs would be consistent and functional in both clients for free. This effort doesn't have to be duplicated and shouldn't be. Blodir created an online replay tool, and the leaderboards are already online, so this is clearly possible.
I can see an immense amount of work going into the Java client but I still see all of the issues I mentioned remaining year after year, most of which were reported even before it was made the official client. I can see virtually no work going into the Python client yet it remains mostly functional and preferred by many people. I'm fairly confident it would take less work to fix the tabs in the python client and keep it running than to bring the Java client up to my standards. It would even be mostly free if the tabs were online.
Of course, you cannot force people to do this. If they adamantly refuse to work on the Python client for whatever reason then that's how it will be. I can also continue to adamantly believe that is a stupid thing to do and complain about it. I am equally stubborn and refuse to open FAF anytime the Python client is broken and the Java client still sucks. I see them wrestling with Java and JavaFX constantly so it is strange for them to prefer it. In this language and framework, it is apparently a monumental task just to display a chat window and user list without using all of your RAM and CPU. Anyone who can program in Java can program in Python and vice-versa.
Yes, I am grumpy and lazy and won't do any work on either client myself. People do work for free and I complain about it. So it goes.
