Worked on it in the past and definitely can confirm. Should be better with Asterisk 15.

Not necessarily. It has a lot of room for useful and even positive applications. For example, I have worked on a non-profit project to track class attendance around Cape Town and it proved being quite effective.

We use Wombat! Nice to see there is a new version out.

Are there timed-out blacklists yet? this is something we have been asking for a while.

Not really. Not yet, at least.

To me it looks like it's popular with programmers and tech types; my impression is that more or less nobody else uses it.

I sometimes use this - that was built as a call-center simulation - to get quick-and-dirty figures to have an idea of the actual queueing strategy tradeoffs. Queueus are okay, depends on what you want to do with them. http://queuewiz.queuemetrics.com/

Was looking to something that looked more like the life-cycle of Java servlets. The problem was avoiding to connect to web services before they are ready to serve requests, and creating an easy template for deployment. Try it!

Interesting idea, but my eyes bleed. And I'm a Java programmer. Would rather use Akka or SlicedBread (the latter trading almost all features for the added simplicity but working well and being super-simple).

"504 Gateway Time-out". Seems quite a radical redesign.