I think you misunderstood what jgarzik is saying. The idea is that we store the data in a second blockchain, and put hashes of that timestamped data in Bitcoin, which hashes would also be less than 40 bytes. The reason we did not do something like that is not a matter of "intellectual laziness", but rather of implementation complexity. Counterparty is not a project in computer science; it is designed to be a simple as possible, for the benefits in development speed. Even if we have to store our data in multi-sig outputs rather than the too-small OP_RETURN outputs. Worse is definitely better in this space.

In any case, we appreciate the suggestion, jgarzik, and if you think we're still missing anything here, specifically w.r.t. the space of technical possibilities, please let us know. Thanks.