sandwich on Nostr: DHT is an obvious solution for the perceived problem of data resolution, has been ...

DHT is an obvious solution for the perceived problem of data resolution, has been talked about since before I showed up in 2022 and is also why pubky exists to begin with; It's a better between technical accuracy and philosophical preference.

Something to consider you may not have already: what happens when clients start developing around the DHT as a first principle instead of NIP-01? There's a few implications of this at a high level:

1. Fewer and fewer clients will work in network segmented contexts because clients will assume all relays belong to a "global state," this limits the potential use cases of nostr. While there would be no technical limitation for clients to support non-DHT discovered relays, they would simply have no incentive to. Outbox would slowly die off, and the nostr ecosystem would be filled with applications that rely on global state for operation.
2. Social relationships are built outwards from the observer, nostr replicates this in its network topology. DHTs represent a global state and then a the observer works from the global state back to themselves. There could be many different DHTs, but then you have arbitrary boundaries that are difficult to cross. The former reflects of healthy human networks, while the latter more closely reflects the human networks we see in mainstream social media that is at the root of an uptick of mental illness. It's difficult to my discomfort with this one into words.
3. Potential slippery slope, once we introduce one global state, then why not put everything on a DHT? Pubkeys? Topics? Etc. It potentially erodes decentralization on a long enough time-scale, and at a certain point it hits a hard upper limit, challenging the "global" intent.

From a purely technical perspective, DHT makes sense and is the obvious solution to the perceived "problem." There are some scaling issues associated with it, but as long as the scope is tight enough the ceiling is pretty high, so on a technical level it passes the sniff test.

On a philosophical level it potentially signals a higher-level retraction the paradigm-shift that nostr has proposed. Nostr is not a payments network, it doesn't need a global state. Humans operate best and are most happy in a localized context, the global context is what is drives much of societal decay that we see today. Nostr works, it's hard to make it work, it has patterns that are intuitive and challenge conventional understanding of network design, but it works and in a way that is fundamentally different way than anything else.

For myself and many others, nostr's "no global" philosophy is a feature, not a bug.

Regardless of my critique, great work! Interesting exploration. It is inevitable someone would eventually dive into this. But not what I'm personally looking for in when establishing digital human connections. Unfortunately, I fear this is where we will end up because it's such an obvious optimization, and it's difficult to refute.