Ya that's what I noticed too.
When I mentioned I'd see if I can bring it back to life is by implementing it, to be the first nostr client to implement seriously, hit up the creator to soft get back into it as a result and help a bit with financial burned as well as help with designs, and depending on the success of my client it would bring attention to Nomen in the scene (both positive and negative since it got shot down), then hopefully we'd see if it'd properly live or not.

How I see Nomen is just that, a simple name indexer with an end user cost of cheap to expensive depending on traffic, and I wouldn't want control of who takes names and wouldn't want expirations on names either (if someone took google, and the actual company wants the name but aren't successful in buying it off the person, then their name would be google:1 or google:2, depending on when they got the name). Of course it'd also be used as a handle for nostr users.

In regards to how people would check for names, well, a lot of people are already running Bitcoin full nodes, so a one time scan then keeping it running along with the node would be it. Sites/apps would link to such scanners to fetch names and that's it.

One question I had in mind though, regarding pubky, is why another keypairs? Couldn't it be built on top of nostr and use it's keys?