The error message have always been an issue, even with early releases. That being said, it was much easier to trace errors when there were fewer high-level func

The error message have always been an issue, even with early releases. That being said, it was much easier to trace errors when there were fewer high-level functions and you had to build the layers yourself. You fully understood what the graph looked like, and it was mostly obvious where something is likely to go wrong. Sure, it's a bit more work, but in the long run it saves times because it avoids the situation where you need spend half a day trying to understand opaque TF code touched and extended by 100 different developers. EDIT: Also, I LOVE the Github issue you posted. It's such a beautiful example of complexity cost when a large number of people is working on a project and there's no longer a single person that fully understands how code interacts across modules.