[IamNotAtWork]

Hashbase seems to function as one of the nodes in the DAT network, so even if none of the peers are online at least Hashbase is still there. That's what I gathered from a quick scan.

The DAT network seems interesting and is new to me, but like you said, needing a central node to cache the data seems like breaking the p2p story.

[lucideer]

Hashbase is a convenience feature, bridging the gap, so to speak, between p2p and centralised systems. It's not required at all for dat:// to work.

The main benefit is that users of http browsers can visit your dat:// site.