"The horror, the horror."

Forgive the ignorant question, what made CORBA terribile?

I only used it during university and it seemed overengineered but it mostly worked, and I vaguely recall IDL to be nice.

I'm guessing interop was actually atrocious?

Synchronisation based on spooky action at a distance of mutable objects.

CORBA had the concept of distributed objects which is a terrible idea in practice.