Anyone else a programmer/tech person that thinks blockchain is awful for storing information?

Centralized servers are extremely good at what they do. I feel like most of the time blockchain isnt needed unless things need to be decentrally verified.

I was considering doing my own 'cryptocurrency', but I decided a centralized server was better for doing the job at hand.

It seems like a really good way to store small pieces of information that aren't changed very often. Such as Name System Registry entries. It works really well for this type of use case, and name registries are good things to be distributed. Using an EVM based blockchain allows me as an engineer to get strong identity, authorization and storage guarantees for free, leaving me to focus on the logic and systems around how names are changed and what those names mean.

You might have had misconceptions about the blockchain, but you seem to have come to the correct conclusion. It is awful for storing information, and it's generally not meant for storing information. Obviously you can combine traditional servers and blockchain in a such way that the system is completely decentralized, such as Sia https://sia.tech/.

Patchwork looks great. But it's an old-school distributed/federated app in the vein of IRC or XMPP, right?

The definition of a "dApp" these days seems to require blockchain, either for storage or for a token ecosystem. This co-opting of the word "distributed" is unfortunate but probably as difficult to fix at this point as the misuse of "crypto".

Dapps mean apps on blockchain and consensus. Patchwork does not apply, otherwise one could mention "Torrents!" etc. You would be at least 20 years late to the party.

That seems like the point the parent is making: we already have "distributed apps" and have for decades.

By making that point its implied that he doesn't understand why has this new term, "Dapp", been created.