So. Maybe an interesting question is: What sorts of applications and protocols will work in a mesh topology? That set might be interesting. For example, you could imagine big chunks of Nextdoor working well in a mesh topology, since it's already a geo-limited social graph by design.
After that, the next step might something as open and decentralized as Ethereum.
I only have Comcast as an option for broadband Internet. This is the direct result of the protocol's topology. This is power and control that no amount of protocols written on top of TCP/IP can break. We can keep wanting to have decentralized or non-centralized services, but I don't see it actually happening on the TCP/IP Internet: The economies of scale are too powerful too compete against.
If we tried to layer a road network exclusively on top of a rail network, we'd just have a less efficient rail network.
In the case where there is only one link between two towns, then the owner(s) of the switches at either end of that link will be able to charge a monopoly price for the bits that get sent across it. Market forces will soon encourage others to create additional links between the two towns.
In the bootstrapping phase of my plan, the case of a single link between two cities would be impossible: Network participants would create tunnels through the IP Internet (with the obvious downside of higher latency and cost).
Back to my original question: Should I be spending my time on this? You claimed that crypto was a better route because mesh doesn't scale. I'm not a crypto genius, but I do consider myself a reasonably proficient systems software engineer. I feel that if I could design a scaleable mesh network protocol stack, many of the problems we're discussing become tractable. What do you think?