Should this be implemented in software at all?

Your reply was, by contrast, most gracious (I say as someone who has no emotional attachment to Infiniband design [grin]).

But since I can't withdraw my comment (I think), I at least fixed the Subject of this reply to reflect what my provocative question really was. (I certainly didn't mean to exclude NICs as an implementation target, which are probably considered, by anybody's definition, part of an "endpoint", or maybe even an "endpoint" in their own right, if they are smart NICs/"DPUs".)

That said, if you are being gracious enough to give your code away, it's not my business to question what use the rest of the world may find to make of it. Clearly it has found plenty of use for Raft, TCL, etc.