@kara CORBA seems pretty much par for the course for things designed by committee in the 80's and early 90's, like Common Lisp and X11.

"Sort of does the important things but nobody ever actually *wants* to use it."

The Right And Virtuous Path is to take the things that are simple and nice, so people actually *like* using them, and make them incrementally powerful enough to do the Hard Things.

Start with JSON. Then JSON schemas. Then JSON-RPC. Then CBOR. And so on. Incremental improvement.