That is great in theory but it throws out all of the deeply rooted tooling that reports and aggregates http status codes across the service architecture. It is

That is great in theory but it throws out all of the deeply rooted tooling that reports and aggregates http status codes across the service architecture. It is nice to be able to tail the apache log and see the status. In your situation I would need to have an additional system that uses application details for similar purposes.. you can do it as you describe but there is a cost! It is also against convention, which increases the custom tribal knowledge that people working in that system have to acquire. By the time you "outgrow" http I assume you'd have custom metrics and logging/tracing, but I would not suggest it as a good place to start.