The other interesting spec for a message queue protocol is http://mqtt.org/

There is even a RabbitMQ plugin for bridging the two worlds: http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/09/12/mqtt-adapter/

To me it sounds like most of the value prop of amqp was thrown out the window and it has just become the opposite end of JMS.

Opposite end of JMS would be pretty good still. AMQP/1-0 throws away the broker model which is well defined in JMS (Queues & Topics).

Why does this submissiong have a "| kellabyte" tag? I thought that wasn't allowed here.

"| kellabyte" removed.