I argued that only payments solve the DM issue, and the reason clients are not converging on one spec in the first place is that they have little hope to get their users pay for DMs, so they try to cook up a multitude of specs to escape this reality. Get users to pay -> ossify/converge specs = easy. That is what I argued. Do you find something problematic with that?

NIP 4 still handles the spam angle with a possible wot filtering without payments. This makes it usable. Usability comes first. Encryption is still hiding the content, and we can NOT do better, at the moment because _someone_ must pay for DMs to be more private, that's just the reality. I funded a NIP17 PR to be included in NDK. It was merged, and then I realized the shortcomings so couldn't actually implement it in SatShoot, and I was not happy about that. I agree NIP17 is the way short term, WITH payments. Perhaps MLS later, or signal protocol. But without paying users it's hopeless in my opinion so I am tackling that problem first. Beating the drum about DMs doesn't get you anywhere, and no, it is not an easy problem.