GNOME and input method integration

I don't have good answers here. I want a nice, standard input method that Just Works, too. I'm happy if that's ultimately iBus, at least if I can convince it to handle phonetic input with manual commits, preferably without writing a lot of C code.

What we have now are a number of clunky-but-mature solutions that cover a lot of use-cases: Traditional Chinese (for Taiwan), phonetic customizations (for Chinese "dialects"), online dictionary lookup, enterprise users who run Java apps, Emacs users who need both XCompose *and* an input method, and so on. Chinese speakers probably get all this from their distro, whereas users with specialized needs probably spent a day reading tutorials and kicking stuff.

As far as I can tell, iBus is well-designed but relatively immature, and it's of limited utility outside of Gnome.

I can see some sensible ways forward: We could announce that iBus is the future, make it an overridable default in most distributions, and spend a year or two ironing out the bugs. Or we could just go ahead and make iBus mandatory in the next release, while it's still half-baked.

I really want a beautiful, well-designed UI, and I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of customization to get one. But I'm not willing to put up with massive regressions every 6 months.