Yes - In Beaker we have plans for a userland namespace, which will be under the "app://" scheme. And we may someday move from DNS-over-HTTPS to something like DNSSEC, but that's not planned yet.
I'd love to see a kind of reverse-DNS-style tagging system, so that when my browser comes across a dat:// link it can automatically show me that this content is commonly tagged as "book, Fahrenheit 451" or such.
That's not far off from what we're thinking.
What about storing the dat link in a TEXT dns record?
(If short names always depend on some content hosted at https://same-domain.tld, what's the point?)