I like your perspective. It reinforces and states more bluntly what were my thoughts on this topic.

But the app is partly a social commenting app, with reddit style comments. And for some other features, there are some one-on-one communications that need to happen. For now, those conversations happen out of band ( discord, ... ). Users that are out of the loop just miss out and even users that are in the discord room keep asking for in-app messages regularly. That's why now, it's on the todo list.