This comment in tech crunch article is misleading and you may want to clarify on that. I agree that this is a nice feature for kafka streams or applications having consume-transform-produce loop. I as user/dev like kafka because of the design choices taken to keep things simple and much effective for users.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/30/confluent-achieves-holy-gr...

“It’s kind of insane. It’s been an open problem for so many years and Kafka has solved it — but how do we know it actually works?” she asked echoing the doubts of the community.