Apologies in advance if this is a stupid or impossible idea.

What if, instead of hijacking a distro, a bedrock daemon could be installed in a distro, and then started as part of the boot up process (from an rc script, like dbus or eudev)? It would then load a config to then activate any strata. In this situation, the main distro that the bedrock process runs within would have to be the global/init/main strata.

Advantages: easier for the user, can uninstall/reinstall, no worry about how the distro's initrd mounts things.

Disadvantage: the first or main strata would not be a strata, so cannot be removed or disabled, so you'd better like it.

No worries! The maximum possible harm from asking a question like this is fairly small, but the possible benefit great. It's often worth asking, even if it doesn't turn out.

As described, it's Bedrock Linux with some features removed, as well as the ability to control the system serverly restricted which may limit future growth potential. I don't see any advantages to this, but I do see a number of disadvantages.

People who would want what this gives you could just do a hijack install, set the hijack distro as their default init, set the init-selection timeout to zero, refuse to remove the hijacked distro, and refrain from using some future feature additions, and be pretty close.

I don't see how. My guess is you're assuming some existing user-friendliness issues are fundamental to the fact Bedrock describes itself as a distro. If so, I do not believe that to be the case for any issue I can think of. It may be worth emphasizing that the key goal for the next release is to smooth over user-friendliness issues; it's a big hurdle and part of why it is taking so long to get this release out.

The work that would go into making it possible to uninstall bedrock-as-a-daemon could just as easily go to making it possible to revert a bedrock-as-a-distro hijack. For the current release - Nyla - it'd be about equally as difficult. This isn't an advantage to bedrock-as-a-daemon.

There was a minor issue around this due to an incorrect assumption I made when developing the current release. It's already resolved in the work for the upcoming release. There's no worry to remove at this point.

As you're describing it, yeah; no disabling or removing it. No choosing another distro's init, either. Using other distro's daemons in your init would be more work to do correctly. There's also more work, as Bedrock would have to support the init systems of various distros more closely to make sure they kick off Bedrock's daemons correctly. I had some ideas (that might not be viable) about adding support for swapping out the bootloader in a future release; that would also go out the window. It'd also remove some key tools from Bedrock's toolbelt for controlling the system and may limit other future features I hadn't thought of yet.