It sounds the real problem is there might be a lack of production caliber load balancers for $MQ, rather than HTTP possessing any intrinsic advantage. How is l

It sounds the real problem is there might be a lack of production caliber load balancers for $MQ, rather than HTTP possessing any intrinsic advantage. How is load balancing anything but an implementation detail, since one can usually be written as a service utilizing the same protocol in question? That's how HTTP reverse proxies usually work (notwithstanding other methods of balancing load such as DNS). Other monitoring aspects such as feedback are already built into well-designed MQs. If that feedback isn't being acted upon properly, then that's again a problem with the implementation -- the same could be said for a HTTP-based task queue that simply ignores errors. It's not "extra work"; it's just different.