What is interesting about the literature on designing systems with robustly stable and efficient network behaviors is how restrictive the known solutions to this problem are in terms of how a protocol must be designed. At the same time, it is enlightening to realize that every robust large-scale distributed system employs the mathematics pervasively. Email spam is a predictable failure mode for the SMTP protocol per the mathematics, once you start thinking about it that way.
The most important counter-intuitive idea is that robust distributed protocols are subtractive. You can't design a distributed system around creating good properties per se, you can only design a distributed system that suppresses bad properties. An optimal distributed protocol is one in which the various well-known pathologies are naturally and effectively suppressed by the behavior of the protocol without suppressing aggregate throughput.