We debated the same question and went with NSQ for now. We might need some of the guarantees that Kafka makes in the longterm or for some specific use cases, but for a no thrills distributed messaging platform that is incredibly simple to operate at scale, NSQ is pretty fantastic.
Building client libraries is also a joy. I blogged about it a bit here: https://product.reverb.com/how-to-write-an-nsq-consumer-in-g...