One thing that we wish to achieve with the remake of Fedora Badges is to provide some semblance of a system that other FOSS communities can get inspired from and extend from. The fact that having our systems bound to third-party service that is not managed by our infrastructure and engineering community just puts me off. I mean, if the folks actively working on developing the system have limited access to what happens there (and how), we cannot empower new contributors to participate even if we have all the intentions to do so. These were my ideological reasons.
Coming to my more technical reasons, the badges implementation in Discourse, leaves a lot to be desired. There is no proper implementation of leaderboards and I am not sure if folks can manually add new badges into the system and award them as they see fit. Surely, we can make efforts to add those things but it would be a lot of bending Discourse to fit our purpose (difficult) than to make something which natively has our purpose (easier). Although, if we follow up on the experiment that @mattdm did[1], we totally can add viewing of badges here as a “nice-to-have” goal.
Note: I would be unavailable for the discussions during the weekends. See you folks on Monday.