That's one of the problems we're trying to solve with Ufora.
Because it's so much more difficult to write "high performance parallel simulations", we want to make it so you can write whatever code you want, and let the platform figure out how to make it fast, parallel, and distributed.
I find it concerning when project developers don't seem to know exactly WHY the product exists or how it compares to competition on the market.
If I'm spending a lot of time working on a product that has a clear competitor(s), I'd expect to know exactly why my product is going to be better than those competitors (ie. in which ways), and what their weaknesses are.
The metrics are often broken. Think about how you measure it...
Ideally, you want to pay the ad platform for sending you a user who will buy your product. So you say something like:
"I'll pay you X for every user you send me who buys something".
Great, right?
Except now the ad can simply optimize for users who were GOING to buy your product anyway. So now you've spent money getting users who would have been there anyway.
What you really want is to pay for users "Who buy my product, but would NOT have bought it without the presence of the ad". And that's a much harder thing to measure.
FD: I work at Pivotal (but not on Concourse), the makers of concourse.