Haha, it was evident. I'd echo the complexities of managing self-hosted Apache Kafka at scale.

But because the Pico's semantics are close to Kafka, but not tightly coupled, it's quite feasible to support the Kafka protocol, * with some restrictions *, such as a topic can only ever have one partition, no support for transactions (since they would only really apply when producers are publishing to multiple streams), and more along those lines. As a result, you'd get Kafka with no topic tax and a lot less operational complexity.