Yep. This is temporary; we have a native version manager, but it's still a work in progress as it doesn't handle connecting to servers with different versions yet. The per-game native client downloads are a workaround to enable people who can't use the web client to connect to a running game, but we agree that it's not ideal.
In the near-future, our plan is to have a single binary that you can download that will automatically retrieve the right version of the runtime for the game you're running locally or for the server you're connecting to. The first half of this - running locally - already works, but we can't distribute it as a general solution until it handles servers, too.
> The reason the latency is so bad is because the game has no local simulation, so any state update will require a full client-server-client RTT.
Yes and no. We offer the ability to run code on the client - so simulation is possible - but you're correct that we don't do any automatic prediction yet. This is for two reasons:
1) PhysX does not run on the web at present. We'd like to rectify this by upgrading our version of PhysX, or switching to an alternate physics engine, like Jolt or Rapier. Until this, we're reliant on the server to provide physics updates, which limits what we can do with physics prediction.
2) Our end-goal is to make it possible to provide prediction as a package, and not as an inherent feature of the runtime. We're aware that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for prediction - what works for a fighting game won't work for an open-world game - so we are purposely avoiding being prescriptive about this.
Of course, it's going to take a while before we get there; we'll need to build up a significant amount of functionality to do so. In the meantime, we hope to build towards this in gradual steps so that our users can benefit, even if the full solution's not there yet.
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Thank you for the honest feedback - we know these are pain points, but we're committed to addressing them. There's a great many things we'll have to address to see our vision through, but rest assured we're not ignoring them.