To answer your question, Fundamentally a Synchronous distributed design has nodes in the system set an upper limit on how long it takes for things to happen, li

To answer your question, Fundamentally a Synchronous distributed design has nodes in the system set an upper limit on how long it takes for things to happen, like max RTT and computation time. Algorithms based on synchronous systems are much simpler but theyre also unrealistic both in theory and usually in practice as well (without clever hacks handling edge cases). For example its difficult to set time limit on how long a node on the internet will take to respond. One may reasonably say 10 seconds max, but what happens on the day it takes 10.1 seconds? The system collapses. Asynchronous systems do not consider time at all so they don't suffer from those classes of problems but algorithms based on them are more complex.