Yep, I have, no issues with the consumer/producer knowing who the partition leader is.

That said, curious to hear your experiences :)

I don’t have issues per se as long as I stick to librdkafka but even that is constantly playing catch up.

Outside of librdkafka and jvm client, it’s gloves off.

Yeah, that's true, using librdkafka from C# I hit a few issues where librdkafka was somewhat behind Java in terms of features, I think the one I hit was multi-topic subscriptions.

IIRC Confluent has started putting resources into it - I would hope so, given how .NET Core is going.

That said, the state of Pulsar clients outside of the official Java ones was far worse, I was looking into .NET Core ones and the "official" one (Pulsar-DotPulsar) lacked some key features, whereas a third party one, pulsar-client-dotnet, had far more features, but was still somewhat behind the Java clients.

Caveat is that I looked into all of this when Pulsar was at version 2.6, it's not at 2.7.1, so my comments may well be out of date.

kafkacat is excellent.

https://github.com/edenhill/kafkacat

Definitely, if all one needs is command line.