And they're deprecating hot patching, which was one of the selling points of earlier releases. Guess it didn't work out -- I've seen enough problems with it using JRebel: for development it's just not worth the effort (and money) vs. hypothetical time saved.
It's not so much about in which scenarios it works or not, it's worked pretty well for people for a few years now. It's about how much magic you want in a production environment. Cluster dance gets the same net gain and is universally used everywhere. LiveRebel just takes care of orchestrating that out of the box and in synch with rest of the release aspects.
Really good to see more products/tools in this space. I don't mind the whole Docker/Chef/Puppet + scripts approach, but it's not for everyone.