This is the kind of thing I'm talking about though... we go from "Erlang is a piece of cake for distributed systems" to some pretty advanced concepts and telling people to "roll your own" for an extremely common use case: not wanting your entire application to be taken down by an unreachable external service.

Back in the day, I found this to be a pretty good 'circuit breaker' type of thing: https://github.com/jlouis/fuse

I wrote something similar for the (OTP) application level: https://github.com/davidw/hardcore