So, the power of async await is no greater than the thread pool manager sitting under it. You are correct. In edge cases where there is only 1 await in the que

So, the power of async await is no greater than the thread pool manager sitting under it. You are correct. In edge cases where there is only 1 await in the queue for 1 process with 1 thread you gain nothing. But you're accurately describing an edge case where await has limited value. Await's true power shows up when you anticipate having multiple in-flight operations that all will, at overlapping points, be waiting on something. Rather than consume the current thread while waiting, you're telling the run-time, go ahead and resume another task that has reached the end of its await. This was possible before using various asynchronous design patterns, but all of them were clunky, in that they required boilerplate code to do what the compiler should be able to figure out on its own: "Hey, runtime. This is an asynchronous call. Go do something useful with this thread and get back to me." Second, await is MUCH EASIER for future developers to process because it looks exactly like any other method call and makes it easy to reason about the logic flow of the code. Rather than chasing down async callbacks and other boilerplate concepts to manually handle asynchronous requests, the code reads like its synchronous twin. int a = await EasyToFollowAsyncIntent(); This makes the code much easier to reason about. To me those are the 2 biggest gains from async. 1. Less boilerplate code for asynchronous calls. 2. Code remains linearly readable despite being highly asynchronous.