In Raft, it's possible for multiple nodes to prevent leader election progress by being overly aggressive when requesting votes. It is also possible for a follower to knock out a perfectly healthy leader by being too quick time out the leader and start a new term.
Both of these limitations stem from the simplicity of Raft's leader election algorithm. To compensate, most Raft implementations I've seen have more conservative follower timeouts that extend the time to detect leader failure and elect a new one.
It's possible for a more optimized algorithm to get sub-second latencies for detecting and re-electing a leader, even in a latent (e.g. geo-distributed) environment. In other words, well within the commit window for the replica set based on network hop latencies.
Also, while the latency for individual writes in single-decree paxos can be closer to strong leader protocols, it is non-trivial to achieve the same level of throughput that is possible in Raft et al when writing to an ordered log, as you cannot start a paxos instance for a new log entry until all prior instances have been resolved. Raft can just add new values in the next append call (or just spam out appends for new messages w/o waiting for the replies for previous ones).
IME, I'd say both single-decree paxos and raft are probably equivalent in terms of understandability, but raft is a better base on which to build a fast high-throughput consensus protocol.