I found easy to get started, it's as simple as the post. The real benefit I see is to plug arbitrary python code to hack requests and responses. It's very good, but I've noticed some crashes in my experiments too.

That's what the benefit of using openresty is. I can print and hack on http requests in an already mature ecosystem.

It's two ways to do the same thing, but I like my way, and mine uses software that is production ready as a proxy :)

Open testy is awesome for lots of things. However, if I'm doing HTTP debugging, I use curl, Charles, ZAP ( https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Zed_Attack_Proxy_Proje... ), tcpdump, and wireshark, in order from simplest to most complex problems.