Christian Grothoff is an excellent academic. In fact, he is one of the most knowledgeable in the field worldwide.

Unfortunately, that's why ,IMHO, GNUnet didn't succeed. To build a successful product/network, you need to be practical, and you need to make useful features/services available as early as possible (without compromising security of course). Designing with pluggability and forward-compatibility in mind helps in this regard.

Academic perfectionism, however, can delay your product/network launch indefinitely. And that's what seems to have happened with GNUnet.