I'm totally with you. I think the problem is AMQP itself. It just doesn't lend itself well to fully managed reliable message passing across network partitions

I'm totally with you. I think the problem is AMQP itself. It just doesn't lend itself well to fully managed reliable message passing across network partitions because it was engineered (some say overengineered) to be "zero overhead" and have "delivery guarantees". If you need message passing across network partitions you really need to ask yourself if RabbitMQ is the right tool for the job. As services like Pubnub get cheaper and gain more acceptance from developers I think they will eliminate many of the things RabbitMQ is currently being used for. If you need message passing features that aren't either in RabbitMQ, Redis, or hosted services like Pubnub, then you're probably doing something sophisticated and probably want to build your infrastructure from the ground up.