Kafka does not fill the same use cases as these suggestions, this may be part of the trouble you were experiencing! My use of Kafka was as a "system of record"

Kafka does not fill the same use cases as these suggestions, this may be part of the trouble you were experiencing! My use of Kafka was as a "system of record", and attaching connectors to create views into the data from there. I could replay a Kafka topic into a MongoDB, run some analysis, and destroy the MongoDB instance.