  Some formats of well-behaved operational specifications, correspond to
natural transformations of certain types (for example, GSOS and coGSOS laws).
These transformations have a common generalization: distributive laws of monads
over comonads. We prove that this elegant theoretical generalization has
limited practical benefits: it does not translate to any concrete rule format
that would be complete for specifications that contain both GSOS and coGSOS
rules. This is shown for the case of labeled transition systems and
deterministic stream systems.
