That discomfort you feel is the gap caused by reality changing faster than your mind can model it.

Same pattern recognition hitting the same limits, different frames telling you to kneel or run.

We build cathedrals to capture the patterns and man sits in awe. We build machines to animate the patterns and he shudders.

Interoperability and plain text is great, that’s not the argument I’m making. Application logic is how arrays are used to encode things that are application specific in the arrays of notes. ["p", "", "spam"] ["e", "", "illegal"] ["r", "wss://relay.example.com", "read"] ["r", "wss://other.relay.com", "write"] ["p", "", "", ""] To your point, is nostr a messaging protocol or a social media protocol or a payments protocol or an identity protocol or a publishing protocol. Hard to be all of them all at once.

Not really from a design standpoint since a single company/team dictates the schema. Interoperability is not on their mind. In the case if nostr, people are not using tags not just for content discovery, they are using them for application logic.