You can have incentives, just as a road can have tolls. And filtering is fine, just as a road can say no to trucks over a certain weight. But they still have to be *roads*.

What makes little sense to me is a mix of roads, and railways, and rivers, and parking lots, and tunnels, and escalators, and waterslides, and drive-in movie theatres ...

You've got search relays, and NIP17 relays (divided into sent message copy relays and recipient relays for security) and NIP29 relays, and app relays, and jumble-style content relays masquerading as users, and whatever flotilla relays are (relays as groups that accommodate the multi-group relay spec), and whatever marmot does, and who knows what other things. How is anyone without a PhD in relay-ology supposed to digest all this?

If people are not making informed choices then all you're left with are centralising defaults, but that's sure a lot of informing in order to be ready to make choices.

So diversity to a point, yes, but to the point where it's multiple routing systems for multiple kinds, and also multiple goals (routing, versus storing, versus displaying, etc.) it's scope creep to me, or bloat, or whatever you want to call it. Or in a more positive way it's a toolkit for getting the most out of json events on websocket relays for whatever your (mostly) self-contained system might need.

Outbox btw makes sense because it's about making sure there's a road. If you just hardcode 4 relays in your apps and call it done then you're not concerned about roads, because those roads can all be blocked and then game over. That's all good and logical.

Your1.0 was like perfect already, just missing outbox, which fair enough, though would have been nice if outbox had been in the1.0.