A lot of the early discussion about P2P dark periods is largely ignoring the usage for internal networks rather than being the basis of customer facing applicat

A lot of the early discussion about P2P dark periods is largely ignoring the usage for internal networks rather than being the basis of customer facing applications. Many large companies (fb, twitter) use P2P protocols for internal distribution of resources. They can make far more assumptions about network topology when they control the network thus these aspects of P2P algorithms don't get applied to the general internet. I'd argue this period was when people really figured out the value of BitTorrent and decided it was often too difficult to expose to the end user. FWIW, I built a BitTorrent tracker "framework" (chihaya.io) that a few orgs use to get the advantages of P2P with whatever extra middleware they need for their use cases.