Changes to how sending messages works

[iCrawl]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As it currently stands, we have a multitude of different overloads for our .send([content], [options]) methods. Some of which are just confusing and lead to all kinds of problems that are not intended in the first place:

channel.send('Hello World 👋');
channel.send(embed, { embed: embed });
channel.send([embed, embed2]) // ??? Normal messages cannot even consist of two embeds so only the first one is being sent
channel.send([attachment, attachment2]);
channel.send(attachment, { files: [attachment] }); // ???
channel.send(embed, { content: 'Hello World 👋' });
channel.send('Hello World 👋', { embed: embed });

webhook.send('Hello World 👋', { embeds: [embed] });
webhook.send({ embeds: [embed, embed2] });
webhook.send([embed, embed2]); // Here it works because webhooks do allow you to send multiple embeds
webhook.send([attachment, attachment2]);
webhook.send(attachment, { files: [attachment] }); // ???

This gets even more complicated now once we start working with interactions and can send normal messages as we can send webhook messages:

interaction.send('Hello World 👋', { ephemeral: true, embeds: [embed], components: [row] });
interaction.send({ content: 'Hello World 👋', embeds: [embed], components: [row] });
interaction.send(embed, { content: 'Hello World 👋', components: [row] }); // But we can send multiple embeds right?
interaction.send([embed, embed2], { content: 'Hello World 👋', components: [row] }); // I can not 100% confirm, but I would not be surprised if this works

Describe the ideal solution

The ideal solution to this would be to have a nice and conform interface that allows a certain amount of strictness yet enough flexibility to cover the most used use-cases without having a high maintenance cost or confusing syntax:

channel.send('Hello World 👋');
channel.send({ embed: embed }); // For the sake of explicitness, but this can obviously be `{ embed } as a shorthand`
channel.send({ files: [attachment] });
channel.send({ files: [attachment, attachment2] });
channel.send({ content: 'Hello World 👋', embed: embed });

webhook.send('Hello World 👋');
webhook.send({ content: 'Hello World 👋', embeds: [embed] });
webhook.send({ embeds: [embed1, embed2] });
webhook.send({ files: [attachment] });
webhook.send({ files: [attachment, attachment2] });

interaction.send('Hello World 👋');
interaction.send({ content: 'Hello World 👋', embeds: [embed] });
interaction.send({ embeds: [embed] });
interaction.send({ embeds: [embed, embed2] });

Describe alternatives you've considered

I had some thoughts about doing something like allowing:

channel.send(embed);
channel.send(attachment);

While the former is completely in line with how bots can send only one embed to a TextChannel, there is a huge problem with the second one since bots can send multiple attachments.

Going back to how we did it before (as seen in the first code block) is a bit problematic since it is ambiguous, provides too much flexibility and is confusing. It opens a whole assortment of problems as to why we would allow it for embeds on webhooks, but not on TextChannels.

Edit:

I also briefly thought about allowing some spread syntax:

channel.send(attachment, attachment2, ...attachments);

But this would be even worse in terms of usability and UX

It is less of a problem when sending only two attachments, as we can do surely do:

channel.send([attachment, attachment2]);

But the moment you want to add more than just attachments you have to refactor your whole code to:

channel.send({ content: 'Hello World 👋', files: [attachment, attachment2] });

While if we make the changes proposed this would not have to happen, since the only allowed method would be:

channel.send({ files: [attachment, attachment2] });