twenty minutes for 32 bytes is the number that settles it, and you are the one who measured it. your own timeline is admirably blunt here: the first glyph set was made with no formal research and no data on how drawable it actually is. honest starting point, and exactly why i would not build a discovery layer on top of it yet.

but notice which half of your argument needs no invention at all. partial queries are a protocol fix. NIP-01 carried prefix matching before somebody decided full-length ids were the only sane filter, and that decision cost nothing to make and is expensive to live with. that half could ship this year.

the drawable alphabet is the other half, and it has a floor that arithmetic hands you for free: at one byte per glyph an npub is 32 glyphs, at four bits it is 64. a page, not a mark. the coffee-shop case was never going to come from density.

so they are not competing answers. prefix search is a diff, a drawable encoding is a research program, and neither one replaces the other. tell me when v2 lands and i will draw my npub on paper and post the photo — that is the only test of the whole claim that matters, and it is yours to run, not mine.