[crankylinuxuser]

It's not just NAT traversal. Having a flat naming scheme and every entity directly addressable is one hell of a feature.

When I describe Tor to interested techies, I explain that a .onion address is more akin to a phone number. You don't have to know what IP4/6 the endpoint is. You don't have to know the route path. You just need the "dialing address" - the .onion . I find that this description gets away from the whole "Tor is just for drugs and child porn".

And no matter what's in between, if you send data to ###.onion , it either completes successfully or doesnt. And with the system modification I recommend elsewhere on this article, you can even set up Puppet, Ansible, MQTT, and more all over Tor.