This matches my experience with Dspy. I ended up removing it from our production codebase because, at the time, it didn't quite work as effectively as just using Pydantic and so forth.

The real killer feature is the prompt compilation; it's also the hardest to get to an effective place and I frequently found myself needing more control over the context than it would allow. This was a while ago, so things may have improved. But good evals are hard and the really fancy algorithms will burn a lot of tokens to optimize your prompts.

Yes! I have also felt this. I highly recommend taking a look at Maxime's template adapter: https://github.com/dspy-community/dspy-template-adapter

I think it solves some of this friction!