The worst of it is that after hundreds of thousands of hours of work lost by users to make up for this lack of blender for so many years, creating a basic version of the modifier will be a few lines of code and will be done in an afternoon.
What we have to find is a way to be able to move projects useful for users who for some reason for the foundation are not. Especially when they are as simple as the one we talked about here.
Take a look at this project which aims to make it possible to write portable mesh modifiers in the same way that OpenFX implements portable image modifiers. It has a blender branch, too. It will enable you to write modifiers that hook into Blender or any other app supporting the OpenMeshEffect API.
We shouldn’t downplay the fact that D1769 produced non-deterministic results. It was an implementation of a Remove Doubles modifier, sure, but I wouldn’t treat it as a shippable implementation without thorough scrutiny.
Just yesterday I was using a boolean and after I wanted to add a bevel but because some of the vertices were to close together there were some issues, so I really think this would help for generative modelling although we should have a section to list some of the modifiers lacking in blender because some edit mode tools like the " Poke " tool would also fit nicely and I found it also missing for hard-sruface generative modelling.
@Wazou, please ensure the patch is rebased on top of latest master, and then resubmit for review. Poke me in PM if you need help.
I have to learn to code in C to do that first 
This was Campbell’s inital reason to reject the Patch, so it wasn’t that ‘convenient’ as you may put it, but I wonder what his take on this with today’s version.
Rejecting.
Remove doubles isnt a mesh simplification method - it just join verts togather, I dont think it fits well there.
But we’re also trying to avoid having bmesh operators as modifiers, so even though its simple to add these I prefer not to unless its a really important feature.
The right answer!
All other software has it, why not blender, it’s industry standard.
I am just quoting the reason he had back then, I think it’s only fair if you mention the guy (in)directly to see his POV too…being “Industry Standard” doesn’t necessary mean the same, as each DCC work differently and how they handle stuff under the hood especially Blender, but hey this might be different now than it was 5-6 years ago so we have to wait and see.
does not seem like a big obstacle for you from what I saw from your addon 
I’m not as good as you think and C is different from python ^^
I just tried to use the word industry standard, maybe it will ticle the devs ^^
We need to do it it’s industry standard !! 
Seriously, merge modifier isn’t different from triangulate or else, so I don’t see why it should not be in blender.
not so different… ^___^
This would be really useful modifer for modelling standpoint and totally must have for completing non destructive workflow inside blender. It’s proven that modelling is getting more and more non destructive when ever its possible because it allows users to come back later and change their model completely different in matter of seconds instead of tweaking it in polygonal level and moving vertices.
Looks like two possible implementations have shown up, but they’re not submitable.
When I read this I just don’t want to support development fund anymore. It seems such a small request that can save a lot of unneeded work. I don’t understand why in 2019 we don’t have it yet.
3ds max has much more modifiers, in Houdini, you can create your own! Blender in modifier area feels like in stoneage.
There is no need to add a new modifier into the modifiers list. Just add “merge vertices by distance” method to Decimate modifier, and everyone will be happy.
I’ve seen an explanation of merge modifier absence - that each modifier in the stack uses a lot of memory. But modifiers are not about saving memory, they are about non-destructive modelling, and if the memory consumption was the only concern, by that logic it would be better to not have any modifiers at all.
This is weird, because a big portion of modifiers have their operator counterparts.
How do you do if you need to merge points but don’t need a specific modifier ?
You need a merge modifier.
I don’t see why we should not have a modifier only for that plus have a merge on each modifier too.
This is the goal of the project I mentioned, extending Blender’s modifier system to interface with plugins. And the developer of the project has already written a merge modifier for it.
Also, remember that the devs are working on a better long-term solution (nodes). Adding any merge modifier to the old stack-based modifiers is a temporary solution. Nodes will be able to do this sort of thing and a lot more.