I don't believe I advocated for the use of Cassandra. Owning vs being owned by, we are not arguing about the same things.

Stances are not strategies, when we use another's API we form a bond but the the other is free to break it so we are automatically at a weaker position. We have acquiesced. But if we choose a strategically worse choice, we have not only acquiesced, but done self-harm.

I agree with this, the best parts of the cloud is abstracting away a lot of the basic maintenance of these applications. There is lock in to some platform no matter what you do, but hopefully you can design your application so that if you do need to rearchitect you can do it in phases.