Thanks! Exactly my thought indeed. Probably now that many people are aware of crypto primitives, permutation boxes and other related tools it is an immediate thought to have, but potentially back then when the game was written it was not so obvious.
Absolutely. One of my recent research interests in cryptography has been identifying ways to make pseudorandom permutations faster and using them outside of typical cryptographic contexts. I'm happy to see that you use them in Rax. They map very well to a lot of data structure problems in networking, not just encyption (i.e. assigning IDs to users).