Fair enough, I should have been more explicit in saying that the team was using it in a weird way for their own purposes. Not only was the use case wrong for them, but the technology wasn't well understood by anyone either. The implementation was partially nonsense.

I'm not criticizing Kafka so much as the way I've seen it used in software. It's largely down to user error, and like I said, Kafka is good software. I had to learn a lot about it for that project and it was a lot of fun. It was my first deep dive into message brokers and I really loved it, so I mean no disrespect to the software or its maintainers.