> Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?

I believe that programs written in languages made for distributed systems are simpler and easier to maintain.

Also I believe that one of the major problems in modern computing is that most languages we use do not understand that even trivial programs require ‘communication’ and OS/hardware facilities that have behaviours of distributed systems such as latency, transient faults, etc.