No, OP is saying that they have over-engineered the protocol, and that this acts as an *effective* barrier to participation, regardless of whether it was intend

No, OP is saying that they have over-engineered the protocol, and that this acts as an *effective* barrier to participation, regardless of whether it was intended or not. Bluesky's protocol is focused on twitter-scale use-cases, where every node in the network needs to be able to see and process every other event from every other user in able to work properly. This fundamentally limits the people who can run a server to only the people who are able to operate at the same scale.