As much as I would like Duke thomas to be a part of as much bat family content, i think it's also important to have him being independent. Having Duke have a comic run where he gets to be his own character (and maybe his own set of villains who knows) and not reduced to a member of the batfam would be far more interesting. He's not confined to the moral code of batman. He has similar ideals to him but he's flexible and much more radical and open about his distrust from the system having been failed by it and batman. He's much more likely to fight a bunch of cops than to work with them. Even though he did end up becoming a part of the we are robins movement, he hesitated because he didn't want to become another pawn in the system that barely addressed the problems of the disenfranchised in Gotham.
Also he quite literally stated that he doesn't need batman as his knowledge of the city and his upbringing inform how he goes about doing vigilante work
He's similar to spiderman in the sense that he's the neighborhood vigilante but his reason for becoming a hero stems from neglect he and others like him experienced because heroes like Batman don't know what it's like to grow up in poverty or be a victim of police brutality everyday.
He can't be the hero for Gotham's overlooked if he has to stay within Batman's parameters. Not saying he shouldn't be a part of the batfam but a lot of batfanon (and canon) content feel like he's shoehorned in because they're overcompensating for the fact that they don't know anything about him or don't know what to do with him (cough wfa cough). Considering the times his feelings of distrust towards law enforcement were invalidated multiple times by members of the batfamily, he should be a lot more distrustful of them than how he is written in canon regardless of how forgiving he is.
MF I WANT A SIGNAL RUN SO BAD. If Nightwing can have multiple successful ones then so can DUKE
