I think you’re taking what I’m saying the opposite of the way I intended it. With enough time and effort, I could probably implement the relevant papers and then use various tools to prove my implementation free of subtle edge cases. But, Flink (and other stream processing frameworks) let me not spend the complexity budget on implementing watermarks, temporal joins and the various other primitives that my application needs. As a result, I can spend more of my complexity budget within my domain and not on implementation details.
