The concept listed in here is either (a) too complex or (b) not complete enough to provide a full rich mental model. CAP was highly successful because it fits

The concept listed in here is either (a) too complex or (b) not complete enough to provide a full rich mental model. CAP was highly successful because it fits in with an existing meme - 3 things, you can only get 2 of them. It's simple, and easy to apply in a trivial fashion. But CAP theorem doesn't have enough "meat" as an engineering analysis, and doesn't guide your system design. Yes there's a proof, but it doesn't tell you how to balance the 3 concepts and how to directly compare system designs. The thing is that as a descriptive model of how an entire distributed database works, CAP just aint enough. That's why blog posts like https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency-models https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency-models and concepts of 'linearizability' are very useful.