While reading the comments in Steve’s initial ESB post, I spotted a paragraph that nailed the elephant-in-the-room meta issue on the head;

Its funny but so few people who also use ESB and WS-* style protocols and tools frequently operate with such disdain for other ways of doing things.

There are, of course, a very large number of automated solutions to a particular problem. But of all of them, only a few will exhibit the desired properties, to the proper degree, that you require for the environment in which it is to be deployed. The more you require, the fewer the number of suitable solutions.

IMO, if you don’t feel disdain towards a lot (97%?) of these solutions, then you simply don’t understand what it means to be a software architect.