Of course APIs that serve as synchronous endpoints to distributed systems are a leaky abstraction. But its not the only one of its kind, there's also Guaranteed Message Delivery [1].

I find the philosophy behind Akka in this context a better fit - embrace that networks are unreliable and build your app around this limitation accordingly [2]. The cost is that it results in more work for the developer just like with the usage of CRDTs.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/articles/no-reliable-messaging

[2] http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.1.0/general/message-delivery-...