It was definitely the case with the Semantic Web: a much greater up-front investment with only hypothesized pay-offs down the road. Making simple things hard is rarely going to be a popular choice.
I would argue yes, that itβs a good success story: it took a welter of init scripts, supervisors, logging, event-triggered notification systems, configuration conventions, etc. and provided a single standard mechanism which is easier to work with than any one of those was on its own much less the number of combinations most systems have.
