I think all these kinds of papers are very confusing. Comparing RSM (replicated state machine) to Paxos is just like comparing a car to an engine. It makes very little or no sense.
In the original Paxos paper (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf), the part 3 (RSM) is not extensively explained. There are countless ways to use Paxos to implement RSM. Multipaxos/Raft/Epaxos try to fill in that gap.
By any means, Paxos itself is 10x simpler than Raft or whatever. Every time I heard a "distributed system" engineer said Paxos is complicated, I know he/she does not have much experience in the field or at least has never implemented the core consensus part...
In the original Paxos paper (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf), the part 3 (RSM) is not extensively explained. There are countless ways to use Paxos to implement RSM. Multipaxos/Raft/Epaxos try to fill in that gap.
By any means, Paxos itself is 10x simpler than Raft or whatever. Every time I heard a "distributed system" engineer said Paxos is complicated, I know he/she does not have much experience in the field or at least has never implemented the core consensus part...