There's a difference between an industry-wide proof of concept and a personal one. If I was making a text editor, I would begin by focusing on making a proof of concept that I could accomplish the features that I wanted in the way that I wanted to do it -- it wouldn't help much to say "emacs has that feature so that's fine".
These long term details are implemented by all established bittorrent clients. I would bet that version 0.1alpha of many of them did not, but were rather in a state of "holy moly this works! I should go show HN".
Webtorrent is 2 years old and seems to have several active contributors, do you really think the "0.1 prototype" argument applies here?
Not to mention we're not talking about some optional, nice-to-have feature here, we're talking about a core aspect of bittorrent which gives it robustness.
Yep! I didn't address your other argument because I accept it and there's nothing about it I disagree with. I don't disagree with any of what you just said, either.
I just wanted to point out that "streaming over web-torrents" is the feature being demo'd here, which means that (a) it's a new feature (I assume?) to this project / these developers, and (b) it's clearly something they feel is a nice-to-have feature, because they not only chose to spend time making it, but also announced to HN when they had a working PoC. If people never posted something to HN until they were "100% complete", I think this place would be a lot less interesting than it is.
I read that as "it sounds like you prioritized getting a working proof-of-concept first over working out the long-term details".