[geocar]

> It'd be very hard to make a protocol that essentially did both

They already had a protocol that essentially did both.

Once you have forwarding/routing i.e. what Skype called "super-nodes", P2P is a clear superset of "centralised".

Anyone who says different doesn't know what they're talking about.

> I'm sure there were other reasons involved in the decision, I don't pretend to know them, but from a business perspective alone, you choose one connection methodology and you stick with it. Anything more is wasteful of resources.

I'm not speculating.

I've seen engineers do stupid things that don't make sense; I'm not arguing that there are stupid reasons for it, and I'm not going to argue that there's non-technical reasons for it.

But technical reasons? I don't buy it. I need some convincing: If one protocol (the P2P one) does both use cases, then you don't need another protocol just to handle one use case. That's just not how protocols work.