[andrewflnr]

You're probably right that Armstrong would be too humble to say it, but increased engineering effort is the only conceivable mechanism for unreliable networks to produce more reliable systems. I can't even tell what you think is going on.

[staticassertion]

In his initial thesis on Erlang, and in any talk I've seen him give, or anything I've seen him write, he attributes reliability to the model, not to BEAM.