If I needed to sniff or debug something it was as easy as putting the device on the network and using MQTT Explorer to record or inject messages. I could even let coworkers that were working remotely work with the system by opening the port outside the LAN.
(If we ignore retained messages) MQTT brokers are not designed to store data, so there's no need to be concerned about durability because there simply isn't any...(!)
It is (just) a messaging protocol.
The nature of my project was that a missed message wouldn't be fatal, and message retention was good enough protection for a process that crashed and restarted.
Hopefully most people understand that I meant that you don’t need a stand-alone broker, which on embedded systems means one more thing to deploy and worry about the license for.
Edit: Also:
> The philosophy of ZeroMQ starts with the zero. The zero is for zero broker (ZeroMQ is brokerless)