[erlang-questions] Why (not) hot code loading

[zxq9]

I've never had a situation where I've needed hot code loading, but a project 
that may be a good fit with this feature is looming (and may not be a good fit 
-- I have much to learn about this feature). Nearly all the advice I see on 
this is to avoid it in production, which seems highly ironic, since this 
feature was designed specifically to ease certain cases of production.

The advice against using it mostly comes from tutorials, presentations and 
asides made by various speakers in talks I've seen. I don't have a canonical 
"don't use hot code loading" reference, but I have exactly zero references 
which urge the use of this feature and explain in depth how to integrate it 
with a release cycle.

But someone worked a long time figuring out how to make this a part of the 
runtime, so...

Is this feature:
A) "Hard" to use because it is far outside the experience of the average Java- 
or web-developer-turned-Erlanger who tends to give talks about Erlang.
B) "Hard" to use because it is actually hard: a technically complex feature 
for which little scaffolding is available for easy integration.
C) Actually not very useful.
D) People have been trained to accept maintenance downtime and believe that 
loadbalancers are the answer to everything?

Most of the best tools I've ever used fell into category (A), so I wonder if 
that is the case with this feature. Some things I've really liked in 
environments like Guile fell into category (B), which was nice because after 
some thorough study something complex but understandable can be abstracted and 
made easy to use. I have a hard time believing that this feature actually 
falls into category (C), feeling it is much more likely that widespread 
acceptable of the (D) view simply obviates much deep thought on the utility of 
it in the first place -- especially since so much focus, even within the 
Erlang community these days, is on the web and not other areas.

Can anyone provide some insight into this? I'd rather get some opinions now 
than spend time getting to the bottom of a relatively untaught feature only to 
find that it wasn't very useful.

-Craig