Hey @msharpe ,
I opened an enhancement request that has since been worked and closed on the Spring Cloud Stream project that should make error handling much cleaner since you can specify error handlers via configuration and also don’t need to use @ServiceActivator When you get a chance take a look and see if it meets your needs. It isn’t in a release yet so now is the time to make changes…assuming no issues are found it should be in the next framework release 
Enhancement to specify error handler via configuration · Issue #2374 · spring-cloud/spring-cloud-stream · GitHub