ESBs provide a lot of functionality that make things easy-to-use, such as reliable messaging, asynchronous operation, character set encoding, authorisation & authentication, queue sharing groups, etc. I've tried to replicate some of these things in the past, using both TCP transport protocol and ODP, without success.
If you don't want to use the MQ server provided in your environment you can download & install your own MQ on a different machine. DevTest doesn't mind about copying messages over different MQ instances on different queue managers, or about using local installations of MQ.