I did the same thing and came to the same conclusion. It was a fun week of rage-coding though.
I'm leaning into Nip34 now, there are a few things I need to append to it but I think the direction is correct.
Discussion
Yes, there is a lot of potential with nip34. Its interesting how similar the ngit / gitworkshop protocol is to nip 34 without any coordination.
I already started doing something similar with nostrocket too: repo announcement events.
I didn't use patches but instead created pull request events pointing to the repo and commit.
What I was missing was patches. The ability to send a patch without needing a public bare repo is a killer feature that didn't make it onto my radar.