When Will Thunderbird Get A PROPER Conversation View? [Office Hours Clip] 

Note that this add-on, while alive and well, seems to break with each new Thunderbird update. I've just tried to install it and got a message saying it is not compatible with my version of Thunderbird. It might just take the maintainer a bit of time to update it, but if it's going to be a regular thing it's not an ideal situation. However, thank you for the explanation of why this is such a difficult thing to implement. Getting an explanation like this makes it so much easier to just sit back and be patient, rather than being frustrated about what seems (to an uninformed user) to be a "simple" thing that "should" already be implemented. It would be great though to see regular progress updates on this, and the other database changes, to have an idea of what's happening in the background and to manage user expectations. Thanks for all the work you're doing!

Indeed! And hopefully we'll be able to implement this soon.

Here's the thing though: it's important for important features like this to be native and work out-of-box. The primary reason is that sometimes community developers can no longer maintain an add-on.