I probably haven't thought this true very carefully.

Another reason is that, as I am in academia, lots of colleagues are quite liberal (whatever that means) and have strong negative opinions on Bitcoin. Bringing them into SN directly where they'd have to face anti-science people (again, whatever that means) might not be the best first experience. Still, I would like them to experience the V2V model and this could be a stepping stone for it.

But you're right, lots of things I enumerated could be done in a telegram group with LNURL addresses. I probably have been spending too much time inside this little SN bubble recently.