[grive]

Networking stacks are used in two ways: endpoints and forwarders.

Forwarders are usually not doing much with packets, just reading a few fields and choosing an output port. These are very common function in network cores (telcos, datacenters, ...).

DPDK is not well-suited for endpoint application programming, even though here you can still squeeze some additional performance.

But don't dismiss a framework that is currently so widely deployed just because you are not familiar with its most common use-case.