I'm having a hard time clearly seeing what the problems were with other approaches that ASDF is intended to solve.

Are the other solutions not fast enough? If so what is the performance delta using ASDF? Are the other solutions not scalable enough? Likely not, given that ASDF mentions certain scale limitations-- but maybe those limitations are still less limiting than limitations of other solutions?

Whatever the reasons for making ADFS, it would be helpful to describe in the intro "here is a problem that ADFS solves" and "here is a graph (or similar) showing how it solves it better than alternatives".

Without that context, the description of Features, to my naive outsider's view, is not very valuable and I'm left still asking, "why use this instead of other solutions that many engineers already are familiar with?"