How do you feel about Alpaca in actual use? I've been skeptical about controlling something expensive with a REST api, not that I have anything to back up that feeling, but it always raised my eyebrow

It's been great. We've been operating with it at our observatories (SPECULOOS, ESO Paranal, Chile) for the past 2 years without issues that can be attributed to Alpaca. We had to modify the Alpyca library timeout from 5 to 60s (which Astra uses) given our legacy ASCOM drivers not being as compliant as they should be, but other than that it has worked well.