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> why not just distribute your message over that channel in the first place

Latency? You can hand deliver a password ahead of time, but not messages.

One-time pad isn't a password. It is a flash drive or hard drive full of random bits.

The difference between those is just one of scale and storage.

You still have to reliably move a chunk of out-of-band information in a way such that it gets to (and only gets to) the person you want to have it.

The difference between one-time pad and stream cipher is provable, absolute secrecy, and really good secrecy. If don't care about that, there is zero point to one-time pad.

Also, it isn't just a "chunk", for one-time pad it has to be the same length as the messages. Which is fine if just short messages but a lot harder if lots of data.

If can exchange lots of data, better off using them as keys for stream cipher.

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