Despite being entirely different beasts from a design perspective, they solve essentially the same problem: bidirectional communication designed to minimize latency over a single established TCP connection, with protocol-internal notions of channels and framing.
I love the anecdote (and loathe working with that stereotype), but don't think it applies here. We're not exactly drawing a box labelled "DATA", one labelled "SERVER", and drawing a line between them: these protocols are significant, incompatible implementations that do almost the same thing internally, and interact equally as badly with the remainder of the stack externally. To say the similarity is only superficial seems inaccurate.
It's a bit like redesigning a car from scratch just because you need snow chains for certain roads, and upholstery covers for certain passengers.
This "architecture astronaut" phrase. I don't think it means what you think it means.
The two descriptions you make below describe much more essentially than superficially or "astronautically", the same kind of thing, optimized for slightly different use cases (not even THAT different).
