[iofj]

The thing I keep finding problematic about declarative approaches is that nobody knows them. That means if you're not a lone wolf on a project, the people editing your declarative state machine are going to be unfamiliar with it. Aside from the complaints that gives (and the "look I rewrote it" issues), that means they make mistakes and don't understand what happens.

So they don't last. They're not all that maintainable in real teams. My experiences are mostly with ANTLR code (which has a debugger and lots of tooling and isn't that hard at all).

I'm at a loss for how to overcome this.

[thurston]

Keep using them is how you overcome this ;)