Yeah, GraphQL certainly has many of the features that I was looking at here too, and I figure that it's the rough direction in which webdev seems to be going.

I just... like RPCs.

There's also a vague sense of "buttery should work well for multiple services in a way that other methods might struggle to do so." The fact that RPCs are grouped into services means that a load balancer can shift RPCs to different backends based on which buttery service they're talking to. I'm not sure how that actually compares against common solutions, but it IS interesting :)

Thanks for taking the time to think about all these things! It's very helpful for me.