I’m sure it is useful to some people, heck I used it for a year or two before Mozilla had anything to do with it. That said I fail to see any reason Firefox should acquire it and make it first party. Might as well acquire a webmail, a feed aggregator and a video host while they were at it.
> I fail to see any reason Firefox should acquire it
Because it was profitable perhaps? Why not acquire a relevant profitable business (many already like) just for sake of profits? And pre-installing it by default seems the next obvious step to make it even more profitable.
> Might as well acquire a webmail, a feed aggregator and a video host while they were at it.
It's way harder to make these profitable without too much investment and without using severe user-annoying techniques.
Nevertheless it's already been suggested here a number of times that Mozilla should perhaps also re-invent e-mail.