An intermediary message broker can give you a HUGE benefit though. A touch more robustness (a service can disappear for a short while and hopefully nobody even

An intermediary message broker can give you a HUGE benefit though. A touch more robustness (a service can disappear for a short while and hopefully nobody even notices), you get load balancing "for free" (with carefully designed services), and if you're careful with your framework you can keep failed messages sitting around for you to analyse or even replay later. Most likely with HTTP you're going to need some kind of middle man anyway (load balancers, proxies, etc). Though I agree with your conclusion, and I think it mostly stands for almost all tools. Know your problems and apply the appropriate solutions.