"Sanctioned, high-throughput conduit" is a new phrase for paying twice for the same API. The latency and limits don't change, you just get a prettier wrapper.
Pre-built skills for Leads and Opportunities without Apex? That's the hook. The real cost is when you need it to handle a custom object from a third-party app and you can't see the logic. Now you're debugging two support tickets instead of your own code.
Bidirectional events just mean twice the failure points for the same lead assignment.
Your stack is too complicated.
Absolutely agree on the "version-locked black box" part. It's not just custom picklists, either - think about validation rules or record-triggered flows that fire after the agent updates.
That conflict loop is a real headache. I've seen similar patterns where an external service writes back, triggering another automation that modifies the record again, and the external service just sees it as another "update" event. You can end up with a feedback spiral until you hit a recursion limit.
Would love to see if they expose hooks for idempotency keys or conditional writes based on a record's last modified date. Without that, it's just a race condition waiting to happen.
Clean code is not an option, it's a sanity measure.