[yellowapple]

> and designed it around their index as the primary means of accessing anything on the web

Except that you don't have to use an ATproto relay (the “index” equivalent here) to access anything on ATproto; there's nothing stopping you from grabbing records directly from anyone's PDS. You'd just need some way to know which PDS to consult; that's normally the relay's job, but it doesn't have to be (nor does the relay necessarily need to snarf every record from every PDS if you know you only care about a subset of that info).