The project was a cloud agnostic platform-as-a-service for building healthcare applications. It needed graph-DBs, Postgres, all clouds, localisation, event-streams, UIs, etc. I won't list where the problems were, because I don't think it's helpful -- each project has its own needs, you may well be lucky where we were not. Certainly the project wasn't a standard enterprise app, it was much more complex, so we had some foundational things we needed that perhaps your average dev doesn't need. However, other ecosystems would usually have a decent off-the-shelf versions, because they're more mature/evolved.

You have to realise that none of the problems were insurmountable, I had a talented team who could overcome any of the issues, it just became like walking through treacle trying to get moving.

And yes, Servant was great, we used that also. Although we didn't get super far in testing its range.