>they would be laughed out.
No they wouldn't because almost all of those properties are actually desirable, and the only real achievement of ENS is to approximate all of that. Remember that the whole reason you're even using a blockchain (in the Ethereum sense) is because it artificially makes it too expensive for ordinary people to fork the chain. It has no purpose otherwise. If you can come up with a cheaper and more efficient way to do that then there's no reason to use a blockchain. I'll address each of your points.
>The blockchain itself is the root of trust
Which is the single point of failure.
>Name resolution can be performed by anyone running the client software, by connecting to anyone else running the client software.
This is not actually desirable, you have no way of knowing whether someone is actually doing this correctly and not sending you fake records unless you use some other trust mechanism.
>Users can register names directly by using a piece of software, without requiring registrar companies.
This is not true at all because most users need to go through a number of middlemen to interact with the blockchain in any way. In practical terms you aren't getting rid of registrar companies by doing this, you're just farming the task out to miners/validators who get paid to run the smart contract.
>The whole system can be built within a single root zone, because no parties need to be trusted to host the system on privileged servers.
This is also incorrect, you're trusting parties to host the system on the blockchain which are the "privileged servers".
>In practice the system is highly distributed and available, so has had 100.00% uptime for all zones since launch, a higher uptime than DNS.
The solution here would be to just add more redundancy to DNS, blockchains again don't do anything special.
No they wouldn't because almost all of those properties are actually desirable, and the only real achievement of ENS is to approximate all of that. Remember that the whole reason you're even using a blockchain (in the Ethereum sense) is because it artificially makes it too expensive for ordinary people to fork the chain. It has no purpose otherwise. If you can come up with a cheaper and more efficient way to do that then there's no reason to use a blockchain. I'll address each of your points.
>The blockchain itself is the root of trust
Which is the single point of failure.
>Name resolution can be performed by anyone running the client software, by connecting to anyone else running the client software.
This is not actually desirable, you have no way of knowing whether someone is actually doing this correctly and not sending you fake records unless you use some other trust mechanism.
>Users can register names directly by using a piece of software, without requiring registrar companies.
This is not true at all because most users need to go through a number of middlemen to interact with the blockchain in any way. In practical terms you aren't getting rid of registrar companies by doing this, you're just farming the task out to miners/validators who get paid to run the smart contract.
>The whole system can be built within a single root zone, because no parties need to be trusted to host the system on privileged servers.
This is also incorrect, you're trusting parties to host the system on the blockchain which are the "privileged servers".
>In practice the system is highly distributed and available, so has had 100.00% uptime for all zones since launch, a higher uptime than DNS.
The solution here would be to just add more redundancy to DNS, blockchains again don't do anything special.