Raft is certainly easier to
explain, but it's hard to argue that Raft is more
practical.
For one thing, implementing Raft in a performant way is incredibly difficult. Where paxos has very fine-grained units of consensus (e.g., ballots), in Raft, everything happens through leases, and is totally linear. This is one of the major reasons a bunch of (all?) major Raft implementations do unprincipled things like non-quorum reads. This sort of problem also makes it very difficult to get Raft to do anything on an unreliable network. Raft is also super noisy, so you have to do stuff like piggy back heartbeats in other RPC calls.
One way of thinking about this is: in paxos much of the complexity is in the specification itself. Performant Raft pushes this complexity into external systems. Both of these are extremely hard problems. There is no free lunch.
If the problem is really just verifying the model, then I think you are better off writing a simple modeling language, writing paxos in it, and then compiling that to c++ or something. This was the approach Google took in paxos made live[1] for example.
[1]: http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/08w-dsi/chand...