• Overall, I'm a fan of the project. I like how they've combined the advantages of on-chain immutability (for ACL) with off-chain mutability & performance -- and fully believe that "hybrid" modular architectures like these which are sufficiently decentralized are the future. It's also cool to see how their roadmap embodies your thesis of "progressive decentralization" with future plans to introduce user-owned validators / token.
• In a vacuum without knowing terms/talking to team, I likely would not invest at this stage. While Tableland provides a "data lego" around public metadata, I worry that its utility is too niche. Using your PC analogy, I'd equate it more to ROM -- or in a distributed system, a database of reference data that's mostly static. Given current latency constraints (~100ms for reads / multi-second for writes (atleast on ETH)), this solution isn’t performant enough to serve as the data back-end for user applications. It’s also unclear how they intend to solve discovery and namespace challenges as they grow.

While I can see native web3 NFT projects using this for metadata (esp cc0 ones that want developers to build on top), I suspect as NFTs reach mass market adoption, more traditional creators will opt for either a centralized solution where they have more control or a time-tested (but dumb) storage solution such as IPFS or ARweave.

• What would make Tableland more appealing IMO is focusing on dynamic reference data from verified producers. Specifically, they could build infra to support the automation of reference data (via listening to on-chain events) from a curated set of on-chain data providers and enable builders to query/join against it. For example, imagine if Tableland was the best in-class way for builders to access ETH address->ENS lookups, a detailed list of active liquidity pools along with metadata from Aave/any DeFi protocol across chains, or NFT collection floor price data from OS -- with a defined SLA that was near real-time. In many ways, this is similar to Spec's vision although the approach would be more user-owned and less SaaS.

• Re: optimal architecture, I drew out the web2 and web3 stacks -- and to Jesse’s point, what's most noticeably missing from web3’s picture is a decentralized, performant layer for data availability. While a database is naturally the first thing to come to mind, I’m not convinced that needs to be part of the stack. I actually think most web3 dApps will end up using a hybrid model of a centralized application-optimized database for user/app (off-chain) data, and utilize on-chain for data that requires public accessibility and immutability. The layers where I think opportunities exist are 1) caching and 2) APIs. The same way that smart contracts and on-chain data enable on-chain composability, the idea would be to build a user-owned, sufficiently decentralized PaaS protocol to facilitate permissionless composability of off-chain data:

  1. Caching - There are a bunch of different things being worked on in this broader space, whether it’s bringing DA into L1, decentralized DA solutions in L2 such as zkPorter, or Volitions/Valadium/etc. I think what would be interesting here is a “decentralized REDIS” — a way for builders to customize caches for their applications that sit on top of (and react to) a combination of node data and publicly available off-chain data. One could borrow quite a bit from Tableland’s design around on-chain immutability (representing each cache as a NFT) and decentralizing storage/updates to a set of validators. The advantages here are that 1) builders dont have to rely on centralized solutions for caching, and 2) it would be permissionless so that other builders can access existing caches where it makes sense without re-inventing the wheel.
  2. APIs - Similar to caching above, this solution would enable builders to implement custom business logic on top of a combination of on-chain and available off-chain data, and leverage a decentralized network to guarantee uptime with an on-chain registry that facilitates discovery and ACL for versioning. For example, if you were building a client app on the Farcaster protocol, you could use this solution to implement a feed algo without a) needing to publish to a centralized hosting solution, b) gain the performance benefits of being off-chain, and c) give other builders of Farcaster clients the gift of off-chain composability if they want to re-use your feed implementation w/o building their own.

  Perhaps this exists already and I’m unaware? Either way, designing this is technically non-trivial given size of data, latency, mutability, personalization, etc — but where I believe the opportunity in the stack lies (and would help web3 fulfill its potential).