[ansible]

There are solutions to this now:

https://cockroachlabs.com

https://foundationdb.org

Of course, there are still tradeoffs, but for many applications, a distributed database with strong consistency guarantees is likely to be a good choice for many projects.

[ansible]

Also of interest... The Raft consensus algorithm is used as an alternative to Paxos to decide who is in charge of a particular piece of data in a distributed system:

https://raft.github.io

[zzzcpan]

The tradeoffs those solutions make are exactly the ones most projects cannot really make.