"People stumble over the relay part.

Both these things apply to Nostr:

A: The specific relay does not matter;

B: The specific relay is all that matters."

That part is somewhat ambiguously suggestive that a single relay would be sufficient.

"The whole relay thing just requires people to build intuition around it"

Absolutely fucking not. Intuition is several steps down the line. You're putting WAY too much on a normie noob with that. No. Super detailed tech shit is NOT an intuition. It is knowledge based, end of story.

"Its only more recently that developers more broadly are figuring it out and are experimenting and exploring the possibilities. Not just in functionality but also in how they present it to the user."

Agreed and they suck at figuring it out because they don't normie test their stuff because that's costly and frustrating to have to deal with normies and cater to normie levels of understanding. Some devs are really good about this but they are few and far between. Most devs don't even like people. That's why they decided to spend all of their time with computers instead of people. Most devs are severely out of touch with normies...SEVERELY.

"I don't think this intuition out of reach for the normie, i don't see why it would be;"

This is the problem. Out of touch. This is a projection. You've never tested this notion of yours with a normie pulled at random from the sidewalk or the McDonald's drive through.

What you're not understanding is that we don't even know how to begin to manage, select, switch, etc. relays. We don't even know where to turn for help because different people tell us different things. It's a fucking shitshow.

NOSTR needs a "just make it fucking work, I'm a fucking noob" option.

I don't see it happening until the implementation of NIPs across NOSTR clients becomes more organized. Right now, the whole thing is a disorganized shitshow. I'll probably fall down dead the day that there's a NOSTR client that works across platforms without random glitches every other day that isn't a pain in the ass to get set up on.

This is never going to take off. Normies will not come here. It's too hard and the people who have the ability to make it easier are out of touch with the Normie conception of "too hard".