Can you imagine if Duffield had designed the internet, and all those layers were stuffed into the same bloated MasterProtocol?

But he's not designing the internet. He's designing a monetary medium and doing so using monetary priorities. I know the subtle distinction is lost on the myopic techno-trainspotter species which is why you often see them posting network protocol stacks instead of monetary legacy in support of their arguments, but it exists all the same

The modality of Duffcoin's "monetary medium" is digital and the context is networked; the (digital, networked) resemblance to the internet is uncanny.
Thus the principles of sound software design (an extension of electrical engineering's discrete logic discipline) come to the fore.
You truly believe Duffield will succeed where XT and Klassik failed at "piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset?"