For non-cryptographic uses we have "universal protocols" already, JSON being an example. You can adapt just about any format to and from JSON, if you want. But the fact that this is possible has not solved the interop problem, in the general case.

Similarly for "Hallucinated Servers". Even if you trust all nodes (and don't need cryptography), distributed computing is still kinda hard, and we have to write programs in particular ways to make them efficiently distributable. I'm sure this can work really well for some problem domains, but it's a subset.