A bit of a naiive general question, but why are these things not layered on top of existing technology?
You already have Bittorrent for distributing files P2P. We "just" need an extra layer for discovering new updates/patches so that files can dynamically update/grow. These two problems seem fundamentally decoupled. The "git forge" aspect seems to be another fundamentally separate layer on top of that
We tried. At first we built it on top of IPFS. It was much too slow. BitTorrent is interesting but we need a way to have mutability (repos change all the time). So we built the networking layer ourselves and the forge on top of that.
It's optimized for certain workloads around code collab, so for now we don't want to oversell it. It doesn't have to be coupled with Git, though Git is very efficient at synchronizing changes. The protocol currently can be used for other things than a forge, but having an application influence protocol development is very helpful.
You already have Bittorrent for distributing files P2P. We "just" need an extra layer for discovering new updates/patches so that files can dynamically update/grow. These two problems seem fundamentally decoupled. The "git forge" aspect seems to be another fundamentally separate layer on top of that