They're definitely interesting. I'm very intrigued by this concept of an opt-in lens to interpret additional on-chain data.

While Casey's protocol IS somewhat arbitrary, I'd argue it cements itself via a network effect. If I came up with a different ordinals protocol, say one that counted all the sats backwards, nobody would care about it. In this sense it's not unlike Bitcoin itself versus all the copycat coins.

You should definitely make that post!