TF's deprecation velocity was way too high for my taste. Things we wrote would stop working randomly with their updates. I feel very similar to you about the

TF's deprecation velocity was way too high for my taste. Things we wrote would stop working randomly with their updates. I feel very similar to you about the models being "buried too deep" in their (ever-changing) machine. I much preferred how easy it was to hack Caffe V1 (once you got past the funky names, etc). These days, I really like mxnet. Torch was a disaster, but Pytorch is much better. It's not bad in production, definitely my #2.