This can work, and sounds like a good compromise in that it lets machines and people who care deeply about security use your secure name (which is more portable than an IP address), while providing a human friendly name for people who don't care and just want things to work.
Because if globally unique, human-readable DNS still works, I see no point in migrating off it. If the point is smoother migration, then we should start forgetting about human-readability, because it's going to disappear anyway.
If we wanted to go away from centralization here, that would require a serious breakthrough, the magnitude of Bitcoin.
In a nutshell, we expect that resolvers would ship with a (large) set of default "suffix-to-zone" mappings, that can be overridden by the user to provide a usable and convenient out-of-the box experience. Not that "we expect" means that this would be the ideal scenario, not something to expect when installing our reference implementation right now.
The "nicer" domain I am referring to would be a normal domain from a registrar.
If you don't, it depends on how local your domain needs to be; maybe all you need is a record in /etc/hosts on your home router.