Igor Lesovsky

@Matt since you have replied quite often under this post, and although a lot of time has passed, were compromise solutions accepted or as suggested in the quoted message?
I have long refrained from studying v5, but some functions that were solved simply by a hook, now need to be duplicated by the standard one, or it is impossible.
For example, earlier, to add additional social networks to the footer, you just needed to add a hook for the addSocialNetworks method of the SocialProfiles class, I don't think you will add additional services, the same Telegram and other services.
Further, the same applies to embedding videos from third-party resources, also without any problems customEmbed class IPS\Text\Parser you could add 3 video hosting services, and no perversions.
Or, on the contrary, disable the preview of internal links to reduce the load, simply by redefining internalEmbed. Also, for example, all sorts of harmless things, like in version 4 you can redefine the formatting of dates using \IPS\DateTime was extremely simple, although I admit it was not always necessary.
Again, this is not even a question of habit or convenience of development, here are additional overhead costs for development and additional logical heaps, and most importantly possible serious limitations in the future. If you look at the retrospective about the marketplace in the comments under this post, the refusal of self-hosted does not seem like an incredible scenario, because Cloud is the basis (and the main reason for abandoning the hook system, despite the horror of Monkey Patching and "care" for the IDE) and, as they wrote, it is better to focus on several clients.
Personally, I see and advise all remaining clients with an active license (up to 10 resources) to stay on version 4 as much as possible, or switch to other products. Some clients are very principled and high-quality customization is very important to them, there is no enthusiasm for large manuals and for manual editing of the source code as it was before IPB 3. From a business point of view, IPB/IPS has never been a business for me, since 2008 it has only been a hobby until now, now commercial work is only with well-known frameworks or CMS.
I will of course try to convey to clients that they need to come to terms with and accept the fact that this cannot be modified.

Sooo maybeeee you could add BIG RED TRIGGER to enable hooks with all the risk and consequences ceded to the owner of the forum?
It would be an excellent compromise.