Good point about over-reliance on a single data source — I agree that the real issue is usually how the data is used, not just where it’s stored.
Order books are still useful, but like you said, they represent intent, not actual execution, so if a strategy leans on them too heavily without confirming with trades/flow data, it can easily misread the market.
In practice, I’ve seen a lot of traders simplify things instead of over-engineering bots that try to “perfectly reconstruct” the market. Even for basic operations like moving or swapping funds, they prefer tools that are stable and straightforward rather than building everything from scratch — for example, services like coin24.io are often used just to keep execution clean and predictable.
Curious though — do you think the future is more toward simpler execution stacks, or even more complex multi-source data fusion systems?