Not really. Atomic broadcast is equivalent to the consensus problem. VS itself can be turned into Paxos and vice versa via shuffling of details. All of the performance optimizations the VS sales literature pushes so hard are just as possible atop Paxos, and in fact are done now in practice. It's just a divide of concepts/terminology for the most part.
Maybe this is an example my ignorance on the subject.
Can you point to off the shelf Paxos libraries that both have a focus on mixing strengths of consensus as a first class concept and have been used in extremely high availability circumstances?
Basically all of them support some sort of lease mechanism to avoid one of the protocol phases in the common case. Virtually all of them provide snapshot reads as a performance / convenience thing. It's common for systems to use paxos as the configuration/topology layer while fine grained updates flow through something akin to viewstamped replication. Examples would be Kafka, Amazon Aurora.
