I don't agree with you but I don't disagree either. Our use cases are very vanilla, and now that I have quite a bit of sway in my team, when people deviate from

I don't agree with you but I don't disagree either. Our use cases are very vanilla, and now that I have quite a bit of sway in my team, when people deviate from the showcased Kendo way, I push back and see if the desired way deviating from Kendo is a necessity or a nice to have. If it's the former, we sometimes have the experience you described, though I've often be helped by stackoverflow, their forums or Kendo's support team. (We pay for the 24 hour tier). If it's the latter then I force the Kendo way. FWIW, their ODATA v4 support OOTB with dotnetcore webapi with its ODATA v4 out of the box with an EF model is the perfect pattern for most of our use cases. But again, I don't disagree with you either - but I would stress that any alternatives I've seen have their same range of issues.