[icedrop]

I think you bring up an interesting tangential point that I might agree with--that the people doing the misalignment are how architecture astronauts remain employed.

But the core of Joel Spolsky's three posts on Architecture Astronauts is his expression of frustration at engineers who don't focus on delivering product value. These "Architecture Astronauts" are building layer on layer of abstraction so high that what results is a "worldchanging" yet extremely convoluted system that no real product would use.

A couple choice quotes from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...:

> "What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build."

> "this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out."

[thom]

I don't think this is tangential at all. This whole conversation is exactly the same as Spolsky's point about Napster: it's hard to know what to say to someone who thinks the reason the web was successful was REST, rather than HTML letting you make cool web pages with images in them. And this has played out exactly as you'd expect: nobody cares at all about REST, because it's pure architecture astronaut stuff.