First of all, ZeroMQ is fucking tons of abstraction. It's its own wire protocol. It does crazy advanced things that it would take you forever to figure out and re-implement. It's nice.

You also don't have a clue what it's doing or why, which means you don't have a clue what your program is doing or why. In general it's thought of as a good idea to understand these things.

At the very least learn the tcp/ip stack and why all of the complex things are the way they are. Learn why building a long-distance fault-tolerant fast reliable network protocol is hard. Learn why there's many things that can cause your application to fail to just connect to a remote host. Heck, just learn the differences in different operating systems' tcp/ip stacks and why they are that way. Just using the same framework everywhere isn't going to solve all your problems for you.