While this is true, the tooling and documentation for Dat is quite excellent. So if it's to be a building block, I'd much rather that it have excellent APIs - then leave all the people work to Beaker. It seems like a pretty symbiotic relationship to me.
Agree on the symbiotic relationship.. Beaker is a godsend to Dat. I am a big fan of the technology concepts too, promoted Dat wherever I could. But I'm still afraid that eventually they 'fall by the road-side' by lack of adoption.
Last time I checked (admittedly some time ago) all their libraries were NodeJS/NPM (some vanilla JS, but low-prio, unsupported), and the Dat protocol paper was out-of-date and incomplete.
There is good documentation if you want to build simple apps off of hypercore/hyperdrive, but it lacks depth/detail if you want to go further. Then you'll only find a rather small (though dedicated) community to help you.
Hope they succeed, and also that they start operating less under the radar, so to find more community help. Maybe via Beaker increasing traction they may get there.
Thanks for your feedback and support! We're trying to push forward the specification work to support other implementations like https://datrs.yoshuawuyts.com/.
We created a protocol working group and spec are being updated at https://www.datprotocol.com/deps/. But definitely still some need to improve docs all around! We have an upcoming grant to support this :).
