there is nothing less secure about NIP-04 than NIP-44

they both use AES cipher modes, both use GCM, unless i am forgetting, and the only material difference as a cryptosystem between them is a diffferent HMAC and the use of a second layer that hides the origin from the relay

if you ask me, it's not actually doing anything useful, complicates things, and doesn't help anyone, and has just impeded the progress of DMs, application specific data and ephemeral message encryption by making two where there was one

really, cryptographically they are equivalent, the NIP-44 was only made to try and reduce metadata leakage, and that's irrelevant for ephemeral events

irrelevant