It's been a lot of change and I can't wait for things to settle down and for companies to stop trying to get their piece. I feel like everyone (Datadog, NewRelic, Google, etc.) saw Lightstep as a competitor and wanted to get involved with a competing spec, which is how we ended up in this consensus mess.
Still, it's good progress and it's so much better than raw logs. Would recommend.
Logging is still experimental in the spec. Metrics API is feature freeze and the protocol is stable, so it's more on language SDKs to stabilize their implementations. This is a focus for several of them right now.
Only complaint is the churn over the past year, especially in the metrics world. We use OTel Python and have had to pin our libraries to an older version so we can continue to record metrics stably until the python SDK catches up to the latest metrics specification.
For example, if you visit the OpenCensus site, it tells you on every page that OpenTelemetry is the way to go now. Yet OpenTelemetry's Java metrics implementation is still listed as alpha, and functionality as basic as tags didn't work when I last tried it.
Or, I've been working with Datadog lately, and I want to add dynamic span metadata. My options appear to be either to wire up the (deprecated) OpenTracing client, or set up a full collector/agent suite of OpenTelemetry processes (whose default tutorial configurations appear to be invalid in places).
worth I guess, but bumpier than I'd like.