i spent a long weekend messing around with code and i think the most substantial result has been a new major release for dat-gateway:
https://github.com/garbados/dat-gateway
i've been running an instance at dat.bovid.space for a few days now and it seems stable. no apparent memory leaks, no need for restarts, and i've ended up using it for all kinds of stuff. it feels like a sort of ephemeral geocities.