[ilitirit]

> WCF is one of the most over-engineered frameworks I've encountered so far

This may be true to an extent, but rarely will you ever need to delve into that level of minutiae (which itself is a consequence of WS-*...). I've set up custom endpoints, but that's comparable to setting up custom logging with Log4J. I've extended/written custom Message Inspectors to log/analyze/manipulate data, but that was hardly complex as well, and comparable to what you would need to do in any other environment but without support of the framework.

For me the most frustrating thing working with WCF was probably correctly configuring Windows authentication/authorization simply because there are so many different ways things can fail with similar error messages. Everything else you mentioned is stuff that you rarely need to consider.