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Hey @stevedennis -
From that quote, I get the sense that the container feeds were implemented by trying to force the process into what was implemented for traditional file-based packages rather than treating container images as a different style of artifact. This would explain why it seems OCI isn't a direct drop in fit -- because other traditional package consumers (pypi, nuget, maven, etc) do not behave the same as OCI.
As for the scalability comment - I can see your point if you tried to cram traditional package types into OCI where the client doesn't support that. Could clients like nuget support OCI for downloading the nupkg files? Sure. But they haven't so far as I know.
On the shock that for container images that you have to provide the URL to access the image -- that's not all that different than traditional software packages. Just on those traditional package tools you're specifying that URL Prefix as part of the client's configuration. The client may add in some "middle parts" to that url. And actually you do run into that some with docker: If you take the common nginx-ingress image hosted on DockerHub, the image name is just nginx/nginx-ingress which works just fine in docker and kubernetes deployments. Secretly, that full image URL parses out to docker.io/library/nginx/nginx-ingress.
Last one -- The URL thing. Take a look at some other common registries, including the public GitHub container registry. For those, the URL is always ghcr.io but they then prefix the image with the User/Org (eg: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/pkgs/container/frigate/394110795?tag=0.15.1). Truthfully, Proget could do a similar approach: proget.corp/MyOciOrDockerFeed/image/path/here:1.2.3