Apparently I misspoke, and OWIN is not totally compatible with .NET Core yet. Still, I've found that developing and, moreover, deploying, OWIN self-hosted apps is much more pain-free than using IIS. App pool idle timeouts and recycling are a huge pain for anything that utilizes long-term background services, which happens to be the case with most of the stuff I work on. And ensuring that the appropriate IIS role services are installed is much more of a pain for customer deployments than building what you need into an OWIN app.