[_bpo]

Lots of useful, successful things appear to be magic (especially in their selling points). Early Heroku is a great example in this space.

I didn't see anything in the initial premise of otto that was technically untenable. We could speculate about the "challenges" - the scope was too wide/unbounded, it was open source, it was a distraction from other company goals, it didn't gain enough early traction - but that's simply speculation without details from the creators.