Our strong focus on end to end encryption and zero metadata does mean that one of the original project notions of "you can use delta chat as a lightweight cleartext email client and your contacts don't need to care" was deprioritized since some time now and remains available rather for specialists only. It used to be encrypted mail that was hard to do and only for experts. Delta kind of reversed this. Now it's hard to do cleartext. But you can self host your mailbox addresses. No changes there!
@delta I share the feeling about deltachat loosing its 'unique value proposition' (the transparent 'merging' of emails and chat). The technical argument 'we are still 100% using the email infrastructure' is true, but also kind of moot if I can not anymore (easily) use my email address as handle. Combined with the by-design lack of central contact discovery, how am I supposed to know if my contacts are on deltachat? 'In-person'-only discovery is not great UX imho