Even though it sounded like there might be some caveats, the big four US carriers recently announced that they'd finally get their act together and roll out a joint RCS system, bringing modern messaging to US customers sometime next year. Too little, too late, carriers. Earlier today, some folks figured out how to forcibly enable RCS on seemingly any recent phone here in the US via Google's Messages app. At first, it sounded too good to be true, but in our own testing, it works.
I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.