I've experienced excellent results building distributed systems where the nodes talk to each over via raw udp. often, in the context of message queues, there is

I've experienced excellent results building distributed systems where the nodes talk to each over via raw udp. often, in the context of message queues, there is much talk about delivery guarantees, but in many contexts the same goals can be accomplished by designing the system so it can handle lost messages. for example, rather than a node sending a single message notifying that it has started work on something, it sends a message once a second, saying, 'I am currently working on x'. is that reinventing the wheel? to me it just seems much simpler.