No, it's just that things like actors and STM, and yes, even LMAX are completely overkill for many of the projects out there. Go read up on what LMAX was designed to solve, millions of messages a second. I've worked on several very large projects for huge corporations, where their message load was 1 thousand messages a second peak.
So yea, I don't use STM much, and I never use actors, I use queues quite a bit, but I benchmark them first and use the one that fits best with existing infrastructure and causes the least amount of friction with my client while still getting the job done. It has nothing to do with "actually working on hardware" or "science". Except perhaps that I apply the scientific method in choosing my tech, and that never ends up being LMAX for the jobs I work on.
Actually lmax disruptor is great for all sorts of things, because 10 million messages per second allows fairly fine grained parallelism for data processing and also interactive apps like that app where you have back pressure support that keeps the app from being unresponsive. Real time work means not making commitments you can't keep so if it is clear the system cannot handle a request, drop the message early.
I mainly use the reactor framework, and I have a choice of lmax and a bunch of other queues and also the choice to schedule on the same thread with low overhead.
No, abstractblockingqueue and other general purpose queue implementations are great for all sorts of things. Disruptor has a pretty specific use case - high rate of constant data flow through a system, where it's okay to spin loop threads to consume data. It also requires pinning threads to CPUs to get the benefit gain of cache locality on the ring buffers. It's pretty darned specialised for general use.
So yea, I don't use STM much, and I never use actors, I use queues quite a bit, but I benchmark them first and use the one that fits best with existing infrastructure and causes the least amount of friction with my client while still getting the job done. It has nothing to do with "actually working on hardware" or "science". Except perhaps that I apply the scientific method in choosing my tech, and that never ends up being LMAX for the jobs I work on.