A lot of people complaining about OpenTelemetry assume that it’s a “fancy logging API” and are disappointed when they discover that it is something else.

It’s actually a vendor-agnostic replacement for the client side of DataDog, New Relic, or Azure App Insights.

It’s complicated because those tools are complicated.

It’s especially complicated because it needs to support the special needs of library vendors, third party plugins, and framework-level integrations.

So no, it’s never going to be “simple” in the same way there will never be a simple replacement for something as complex as a Word document.

No, ASCII won’t cut it. Yes it’s simple and lightweight, but not what people actually want.