I think Discord bridging requires encryption to be off, unfortunately, and I personally see bridging as the only way for Matrix to overcome the network effects of Discord.

though we would need a lot of community work for parity with Discord

Not sure if it was FUD or not, so please treat this as an unsubstantiated rumour, but I recall another lemming telling me that Matrix was quite insular and not very accepting of outside code contributions.

So if that’s true, it could be a spanner in the gears.