Ethereum should also make plenty of sense to an average programmer who understands basic cryptography. The concept of a distributed virtual machine shouldn't be

Ethereum should also make plenty of sense to an average programmer who understands basic cryptography. The concept of a distributed virtual machine shouldn't be difficult to grasp. You could dive deeper into either of the topics you mentioned and start losing people - for example how QUIC carries a TLS handshake, or why enshrined proposer-builder separation is important to Ethereum. All that means is that both protocols hide complexity under the surface.