Raft itself is very nice, and the paper https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137... Does an excellent job in explaining it, but I have some problems with this claim: "A user study with 43 students at two universities shows that Raft is significantly easier to understand than Paxos: after learning both algorithms, 33 of these students were able to answer questions about Raft better than questions about Paxos".

Honestly, what I think happened is this: They first explained paxos to the poor students, then asked questions. In a later session explained Raft and asked questions. Can't it be the students started processing the problem of distributed consensus between the sessions so they got a better grasp of the topic? This would mean paxos helped them understand raft better. Anyway I'm nitpicking etc etc.