I think we're thinking of different use cases. For me, all my personal machines have TOR installed anyway and I mostly want public address for gluing things to

I think we're thinking of different use cases. For me, all my personal machines have TOR installed anyway and I mostly want public address for gluing things together or being able to access things remotely. It's definitely not usable for everything you normally use domain names for (like showing people the menu at a restaurant.) I will point out that you don't need to do any extra work to access web servers on TOR at least. I think cloudfront (and I know others) run a proxy that lets you access them with just a normal URL via a web browser. Most OSes need no extra configuration for .local.