It's not as much that. If I am going to be owning a service that I want to use among my peers generally someone has to run the thing and generally I am that person. If I am relying on urbit.org then the goal described in this overview of "Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. And since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it never shows you ads. Or loses your data. Or updates without your consent." is not met. If urbit.org is so entrenched and the galaxy lookup so well defined how do I use this when you are gone? The galaxy lookup is clearly one of the most critical pieces of the design yet seems the most weak. In the world of online games the lookup service is what has a community live or die, and I did not see a better answer after writing the comment.
It seems that the only way is to recompile and distribute an alternate version of the software.
> Hoon is unusual, but I wouldn't call it "esoteric" -- that term is reserved for languages which genuinely don't care about usability.
I would class it as such because there doesn't seem to be a description (going by the whitepaper) of modularity/code layout/best practice sort of thing. There is also the complexity of symbol management from bash/perl/php land that seems to be in Hoon too. I work with grammars all day and I guess I was just looking for a more formal description of the language.