While I was a little sad about the API too, what would you propose that's better? Connection-less network IO seems like it'd very easily devolve to a "giant op

While I was a little sad about the API too, what would you propose that's better? Connection-less network IO seems like it'd very easily devolve to a "giant options object", and this lets you at least incrementally build that options object on the path from your code to this API.