btcd isn't an "obscure" implementation; it's been around for over a decade; I've ran it for years as a second node. It's not as well reviewed as Bitcoin Core, as it has less eyes on it, but the last few years we've seen good contributions, for example coming from fuzzing efforts, so it's not awful at all. I've also used btcd's wire module for custom p2p clients a lot when doing investigations - this module is literally what triggered me to learn to write production capable golang.
However: running a bitcoin node is a responsibility. If you cannot answer Justin's awesome question "why are you running a mempool?" (most eloquent formulation in #1205858 lol) without proclaiming bs, then it would be wise to study hard before making decisions about which node software to run.
btcdisn't an "obscure" implementation; it's been around for over a decade; I've ran it for years as a second node. It's not as well reviewed as Bitcoin Core, as it has less eyes on it, but the last few years we've seen good contributions, for example coming from fuzzing efforts, so it's not awful at all. I've also used btcd'swiremodule for custom p2p clients a lot when doing investigations - this module is literally what triggered me to learn to write production capable golang.