Yeah, the package infrastructure around jQuery is a mess.
Around Meteor 1.8.3 they did add the ability to use a npm version, without bundling it’s own copy of 1.12.x.
But, since jquery is a non-core package, it’s updates aren’t pinned to meteor versions, so the version of jquery installed is the thing that matters.
The new version that you want is jquery@3.0.0
Since you have several packages that depend on jquery@1.11.10, you’ll need to use the new special syntax to weaken the package dependencies.
In your .meteor/packages add:
jquery@3.0.0!
With the exclamation mark.
There’s further explanation on another topic here: Why is aldeed:autoform@6.3.0 trying to pull in jquery@1.11.6 - #3 by coagmano
Atmosphere packages and Npm.depends always bundle their dependencies completely separately, which causes a lot of duplication.
This is why the guide recommends that package authors should switch to using peer-dependencies and ask consumers to install npm packages at the top level, so that they can be deduplicated
So you’ve done the right thing by forking and removing Npm.depends with the required packages installed at the top level