The main problem with cucumber / GWD is that in most implementations it serves as an opaque abstraction layer which is an incomplete/incorrect model abstraction

The main problem with cucumber / GWD is that in most implementations it serves as an opaque abstraction layer which is an incomplete/incorrect model abstraction of the system itself. Been doing a lot of API testing recently with karate dsl and writing cucumber tests that include json expressions with some syntactical sugar for validation. The tests serve as a specification for the system which is actually quite a bit more precise than even swagger since you can even go back in time and compare the deltas on request/response between test executions to troubleshoot regressions. Agree that GWT can't help business understand the inherently complexity of a state machine, but individual tests can be used effectively to model state transitions, especially at the api level.