Cool to read someone indulge in this. For others interested with no prior context, also consider FreeSWITCH.
Personal experience:
I spent about 15 months working for a local telecom company, supporting their asterisk servers and developing interactive voice response applications. I was given the opportunity to build their residential voip service (in 2010?) from scratch and despite asterisk being so dominant I prototyped and eventually completed the project using freeSWITCH. I found it to be so much more developer friendly to configure and extend. Being able to build dial plans and implement logic with JavaScript or Lua rather than asterisk's config files was worth it. I suspect this system is still running.
I took a look at freeSWITCH's site and it looks like they got bought out. Their documentation is a total mess because the acquiring company has imported lots of wiki pages without much care for how they fit together.
Personal experience:
I spent about 15 months working for a local telecom company, supporting their asterisk servers and developing interactive voice response applications. I was given the opportunity to build their residential voip service (in 2010?) from scratch and despite asterisk being so dominant I prototyped and eventually completed the project using freeSWITCH. I found it to be so much more developer friendly to configure and extend. Being able to build dial plans and implement logic with JavaScript or Lua rather than asterisk's config files was worth it. I suspect this system is still running.