It has mandatory TLS (even though I think optional TLS is better), and a mandatory HANDSHAKE command (even though TLS already has the domain name before you can connect), some arbitrary limits, and does not actually add anything that is helpful nor remove many things that should be removed.

It does use a different DNS, although I think this should be done at a different level, rather than specific to the application protocol, and it should not use JSON.

It also uses Lua instead of JavaScript (I looked at the documentation of the provided functions and of its working, and I think it isn't really much of an improvement), and adds a <postprocess> command (which can make it hard to read), etc, but not really much of an improvement.

My opinion is, I think it is not really worth much and is not very good. (There are other things some people (including myself) have done with new protocols, some of which are actually good, but some of them (such as this one) isn't really so good to me.)

Although the author appears to be Moldovan.

There is another discussion at: gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/SmallWeb/15126 (connect to port 1965 with TLS and send the full URL followed by CRLF)

I think Gemini was designed to be between Gopher and WWW (and it is not so bad, although I would have made the TLS optional instead of mandatory; from my experience, I am not the only one). I designed Scorpion to be between Gemini and "WWW as it should be if it was designed better", which has the result of being neither a subset nor superset of the capabilities of Gemini or of WWW (as well as doing things that I considered to be useful enough to keep, such as range requests (although, for simplicity, I allowed only a single range per request, rather than the multiple ranges per request that HTTP does)).

I also think that it is useful to use different protocols (and different file formats) for different uses; e.g. for some types of games (and for live chat services) it would probably be better to use an interactive session such as Telnet or SSH (or IRC, in the case of chat) rather than using HTTP or Gemini (even though both are used).