Think of Grapevine as a distributed email system. Literally every application is forced to fit this model. Bootstrapping is fun. Replication of mail servers, but not of messages. Can be replicated.
Grapevine trades off atomicity for simplicity.
Creating new names requires manual intervention to screen the appropriateness of the names. Replication for availability worked well to stop hardware failures, but there wasn't enough diversity in software implementations to survive a software bug. Testing with lots of users provided interesting insights.