in terms of cryptographic strength against all known attacks

nope

there was nothing gained by complicating things and all it has done is further undermine the usability of messaging on nostr

and the protocol specified in nip-44 is overly complicated, and for the situation where you are encrypting short messages, the use of a chacha20 CSPRNG versus using AES-CBC does not substantially change the brute force vectors

they both:

- use a strong CSPRNG function for generating the message nonces (aes vs chacha20)
- use secp256k1 x-only ECDH for deriving the secret
- use a strong HMAC

there was no technical or security-wise upgrade... only additional complexity

idk who sold the "audit" bullshit to those who funded the creation of NIP-44 but they got robbed