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That would be less 'unixy' and more 'plan-niney' :)

I like the idea of having a FS interface, e.g. using named pipes made available by the daemon.

That's the idea behind https://thefiletree.com/. The decoupling works well for applications tied to a textual format (see eg. https://thefiletree.com/heap/diagram.sequence). It means collaborative SVG editing, for instance, is not a challenge. On the other hand, binary data (bitmap images, sound, video) would need to be treated specially, I think, unless we had a common structure format and protocol that would map to each of those.

(The code is here: https://github.com/garden/)

There was SpockFS here on HN a while back: https://github.com/unbit/spockfs