.onion addresses aren't particularly memorable anyway (Facebook's nonwithstanding). They wouldn't have to go to insane lengths like I2P does, but it seems like not cutting the SHA-1 in half would make it much stronger. I just feel like in striking a balance, they should err on the side of huge security margins. On the other hand, I don't really have an intuition for the strength of the current addresses, so it's not meant as criticism as much as a quest for understanding.

Although I agree it isn't cakewalk to memorise an onion URL, it is possible and many people do it usually by grouping or mnemonics. I'm not against any change/improvement to the current address generation system in Tor; there are certainly other better possibilities for both security and scalability.