Thanks for opening this discussion Andy. I'm also supportive of the plan you've proposed.
Pushback from past discussion was mostly due to the 4.0 stabilization effort. Since then, cassandra-java-driver has been donated to ASF and driver 4.x has had a number of releases, so it feels like the right time to update. CASSANDRA-15750 CASSANDRA-17231 As far as I know, it's safe for the two drivers to co-exist on the same classpath as well. Out of curiosity - why do you prefer tests move towards 4.x driver vs. in-tree SimpleClient? We're already using SimpleClient in tests, and it's in-tree so we don't need to be concerned with API compatibility or leakage. We'd probably have to add some convenience APIs, like binding to prepared statements, to make the transition easier.
