Is this better than a DVM? As an architecture?
Here's a relay for the people who love a little bit of global "trending" notes: wss://trending.relays.land/
No need for a custom HTTP integration and is immediately usable if your client can view relay feeds, like Jumble, Yakihonne, Nosotros, Nostur and others.
It is based on the https://nostr.wine/ trending API (could also be based on the https://nostr.band/ trending API, but that one is currently down) until nostr:npub18kzz4lkdtc5n729kvfunxuz287uvu9f64ywhjz43ra482t2y5sks0mx5sz doesn't expose it in a relay interface himself.
Discussion
I think it's a million times better. Both are somewhat centralizing, but this is really easy to use and to provide, and much faster. And given that they're both centralizing this one at least gives us DNS domain names as reputation mechanisms, which are ok to be used in the short term.