Spectacular failure of imagination? I mean it's a speech codec, an incremental improvement over the many out there that work fine. We're no longer in a world where voice calls dominate the world's telecom bandwidth usage. We routinely receive a megabyte of Javascript and ads and crap to display a 288 character tweet. Soon there will be 5G everywhere, so we'll get 10MB of JS etc. to see the same 288 character tweet. 1MB is 10+ minutes of full-rate GSM, or a lot more than that of Opus. If Lyra is really free (no blobs) and its computational requirements don't make us churn our phone hardware yet again, then great, it can reduce the already very low cost of voice calls by another smidgen, increasing carrier margins while almost certainly not showing in lower prices to the end user. So at that end of things, it's tolerable, while it would be horrible if (say) it were patented and became a standard, so that FOSS VOIP clients became non-interoperable with what the big vendors were using.

Lyra is more transformative in some extreme niche areas of extremely limited bandwidth, say spacecraft radios or handheld satellite phones or whatever. Those applications already use super low bandwidth codecs that sound like crap. So Lyra won't really save bits, but it will help intelligibility a lot by sounding better in the same bits.

There are examples posted elsewhere in this thread, although from a beta version.

Also, Opus already blows any requirements, either in terms of latency or in terms of size. Adding such unreliability for minimal gain seems foolish.