Assess learners' ability to analyze and compare Paxos, Raft, and PBFT by evaluating trade-offs (complexity, safety vs. liveness, leader election, replication), identifying failure modes (crash faults, Byzantine faults, network partitions), and reasoning about performance implications (latency, throughput, message complexity, scalability). Include scenario-based design choices, failure diagnosis from traces, and justification of protocol selection for given system requirements.