Yeah, unhappy people are both no fun and more likely to be confused by the new system.
Thoughts?
Not really following this talk, but for the parts that revolve around a greater than 16 char onion address, I don't see much problem here. There are some DNS RFC name length limitations, maxpathlen posix, etc. But 16 vs a full sha-2/3 hash over some underlying keys is not a big deal. Look at how it's already longer than practical memorization, if not recognition. And how people just bookmark things. Look at I2P sizes. People will whine, but even their current usage does not merit such whine. Change in a name layer might, but there is no name layer today. Flags are ok, people will figure it out.
Now one single area I see problem is if you want to interoperate with I2P / Phantom / Onioncat. That would still be 'cool', yes. But does require some form of address magic if you go wider than current 80 bits. zzz forum has posts about how that could still work... since there won't be more than 2^80 nodes ever anyways, you just need an address map layer too.