I've been doing some research and it shocks me how much of a terrible system XRP is. The consensus mechanism is built as such that if a node falls out of consensus with the network, the connected wallets will still believe that node is serving valid transactions. This has negative implications:
1. It discourages good actors from running a node because they don't want to be out of consensus
2. It encourages bad actors to run a node so that they can conduct a double spend attack against a potential victim.
3. This leads to a poorly audited transaction history. It has now been discovered that some early transactions conducted on XRP no longer exist.
With no re-organisation mechanism, when the node you are connected to falls out of consensus with the rest of the network, you will just have to accept loss of funds as a reality. This differs from Bitcoin whereby if miners hash a block, and this chain is beaten by a longer chain, the transactions in the orphaned block re-enter the mempool so that they can be included in a block from the longer valid chain.
Source:
Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm Review
