I totally agree that you cant do a lot of AMQP stuff. As you noted, you can build some of it by managing state via transactional producers, etc - but you definitely cant do everything. The biggest gripe for me is actually dynamic "queue" creation, patterns for topics, etc. So I use an MQ for an MQ ;)

I'm just saying you can "dumb down" the client side on kafka by creating an abstraction layer (or one of the many higher level libs that already do that).