I’m sorry that this was your experience with JuMP. So that we can be aware of the relevant issues, could you be more specific about what you mean by version conflicts and abandoned features?
I followed the discussions about variable deletion in the gitter channel, and from my perspective there was a productive exchange between you and the other core developers about the issue and how to go about addressing it. For the benefit of readers of this thread, variable deletion in the Gurobi and CPLEX APIs requires renumbering variable indices, so if you do it eagerly O(n) times, you pay an O(n^2) cost. This can be a performance bottleneck if you structure your code to perform lots of deletions. JuMP should have an O(n) way to delete O(n) variables, but it hasn’t been implemented yet. For context, variable deletion was not possible at all before JuMP 0.19, so the upward trajectory on this issue should give you some hope for it working better in the future.
As @thofma mentioned, we do “kindly request” papers to cite uses of JuMP. The question of moral obligation is obviously complex. In this particular case I would usually ask an academic advisor, a coauthor, or the conference program committee. On one hand, omitting the citation is quite unlikely to be grounds for rejection of the paper. On the other hand, citations to JuMP are one of few metrics that we have available to demonstrate its use, so if nobody cited JuMP, it would negatively impact JuMP’s sustainability.
Anyway, we appreciate your contributions to JuMP and hope it will be useful next time around.