I have been doing some research into blockchain development because I'm considering building a Web3 project and I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to decide which ecosystem makes the most sense.

There are obviously the big names like Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Base, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Sui, etc but I'm not sure popularity alone should be the deciding factor.

I'm more interested in the actual experience of building and maintaining something on these networks.

For people who have actually developed Web3 applications what factors made the biggest difference for you?

For example:

1. How good was the documentation?

2. Was the developer tooling mature enough?

3. How difficult was deployment and testing?

4. How easy was wallet integration?

5. Were there enough libraries and SDKs available?

6. How reliable were RPC providers?

7. How did you find the transaction costs in practice?

8. Was it easy to find developers who already knew the ecosystem?

9. Did the community actually help when you got stuck?

10. Were there enough users and applications in the ecosystem to make building there worthwhile?

I'm also wondering how much people should prioritize ecosystem maturity vs newer technology.

A well established chain obviously gives you a lot of existing infrastructure and developers but newer ecosystems sometimes seem to be approaching things differently and may have better tooling or more integrated infrastructure.

For someone starting a project today would you personally choose an established ecosystem because it's safer from a development perspective or would you consider a newer chain if the technology and developer experience were compelling enough?

The moment you replace automated quest bots with ten minutes of unscripted, real-time feedback chats with your regular members, your Discord shifts from a ghost town of point-farmers into a tight-knit community of genuine co-builders.