Exactly. It would be no small matter to come up with an alternative system that has the simplicity, flexibility (including flexibility of archival), and most of all the freedom of email – and have it work anywhere near as well in practice as email does already.

(Google Wave showed promise... but it also introduced a ton of new complexity, and given the pattern of messages "living" on the sender's server, it wasn't clear how archival should actually work.)

It seems most people who advocate this notion that email is "broken" would rather us all use some centralized, proprietary system akin to Facebook messaging. This would be an unimaginable step backward for reasons that I hope do not require elaboration.