I don’t think people have a full understanding of the scope of “simpler” here given the richness of Discourse.
- Login via Email
- Login via Google/Twitter etc
- Login via DiscourseConnect
- 2FA
- Automatic bot mitigations during login
and so on…
And this is just the login page.
Yes, building a new “shadow” Discourse read-write solution for IE6 and Lynx it technically feasible, but the amount of engineering to get this going it just enormous given the huge amount of code that would have to be forked, re-written and double maintained.
I think the only workable way of support these users at the moment is putting them on mailing list mode, then they can respond to stuff via email at least (and have full shadow copies of the forum - over time - in their email box)
There is also the philosophical argument that it is somewhat mean to allow people to browse the web these days, especially with JS enabled on browsers that have a giant list of published exploits. Discourse would be the least of my worries browsing the web on an abandoned browser, my phone being owned by hackers and my identity stolen would be far up higher in the list.