I think it is important to clarify that, and I think Dave would agree, is that GenServer is not wrong. Rather we are wrong in using GenServer to build higher level components, often with domain/business logic, and we need higher level abstractions to solve those cases. When building low-level components, the distinction between client, server, and the low-level callbacks are important, but in your application domain you want to get rid of the bureaucracy and put the focus on the domain code. There are also other libraries attempting to tackle this particular issue.
I agree with Dave in many of the problems he raised: yes, we need to improve configuration (there was a whole other thread about it in the forum). Yes, it would be helpful to know if an application is stateful or is a singleton (and as I said in this thread, I don’t think looking at the supervision tree gives the complete answer). As Dave said, there is a lot to explore. 
