> I think one big win could be to just hide the underlying APIs with better tooling. This is what happened with SOAP because SOAP is too complicated to use wit

> I think one big win could be to just hide the underlying APIs with better tooling. This is what happened with SOAP because SOAP is too complicated to use without tooling. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't work, it's a nightmare. The reason we use things like JSON and REST is because of the transparency and simplicity that it provides. There isn't much mystery when you need to debug. That's the trade off against things like bandwidth and performance. I'm not really disagreeing with your point; it's easily to look at all this and wonder why we don't do it better and faster.