I think that this is more than a bit of a misunderstanding and a generalization. Most of the Apache projects are designed to fix large-scale problems in a scala

I think that this is more than a bit of a misunderstanding and a generalization. Most of the Apache projects are designed to fix large-scale problems in a scalable way. For instance, you would have no good use for Mesos for a personal pet project. At the scale that many of them are designed for, configuration is the norm and the Apache projects save hassle compared to writing a custom solution or trying to hack other tools together. With the Apache projects that I've worked with, there also seems to be an underlying concept of modular components and generalized interfaces, so that they can be used in as many cases as possible. For some people, Mesos (with Marathon) competes with Kubernetes, but there's more to Mesos than just container orchestration. If you're looking for low-configuration, low-maintenance solutions to common problems, Apache projects probably aren't what you're looking for, in general. On the other hand, if you have big problems to solve, they might be just what you need.