This was very well put and definitely agreed with many of the sentiments you've put forth about bottom-up (get up and running with as little rpc as possible) vs sideways development (copy the entire netflix architecture and try to make it work)

I just didn't put the blame on the previous team, maybe I should have for sticking with it for two entire iterations, still not entirely convinced. I think they couldn't help it and the decisions were already made for them by large faceless corporations. I guess what's the point of calling themselves engineers if they don't feel like they are in a cockpit pressing lots of buttons right from the start?

By profession, I call myself a computer programmer, not an engineer or architect in order to remind myself that I should weigh problems by starting from fundamentals such as a state machine, an integer constraint system or a breadth first search, before setting up service discovery or training neural networks.