Every startup starts with a MVP before scale forces a rewrite. Yes most projects are hackathons, but that's true of most projects generally, only, most other protocols/APIs are much harder to work with. But honest to God, multiple of the most popular clients are more usable than most big social apps.

I daily drive amethyst and I can genuinely say it's the best social media app that I use in terms of pure UX. Maybe this is because nostr hasn't been stress tested yet, but I have no reason to believe it can't deal with that better than any other platform/protocol.

Look at all the big social media apps. Reddit app is genuinely terrible. Its slow buggy and UX is so retarded that only a billion dollar company could come up with it. Every time I use it I miss the 3rd party client I used for it before they killed it the API.

Same goes for X, insta, Facebook etc. These are used by everyone and they are all worse than the hackathon projects here. The best out of them all is YT and instagram but even the youtube app is a worse frontend than newpipe.

That's the front end. What nostr changes the game on compared to everything before is how it allows competitive development for back end. We already see large teams being beat out by random devs in front end, why wouldn't the same be the case for back end? We see the big companies try and fail everyday at dealing with the problems of scaling back-end, nostr allows many devs to take a crack at the problems in many different ways.

You said nostr is a liability to build on top of. What part? Everything is optional except kind 0 user metadata. Is that a liability? The protocol doesn't limit you in any real way.