The raft paper states that its use of an explicit leader election was chosen for understandability, not performance. Leaderless systems can potentially improve

The raft paper states that its use of an explicit leader election was chosen for understandability, not performance. Leaderless systems can potentially improve performance, especially when replicas are far apart (so you don't have the extra network hop to the leader before you can get started). The main drawback IMHO to ePaxos (as a hopefully representative leaderless algorithm) is not performance but its complexity, since it intrudes into the application to track dependencies and conflicts between proposed commands. If I squint at the scheme proposed here, it looks like ePaxos taken to the extreme of a single key/value per paxos group, so conflict tracking becomes trivial. It has demonstrated good performance in the case of uncontended writes; I'd be curious to see how it behaves under contention, or when a downed node rejoins the cluster.