Right but this is the irony I think. If you need the scale provided by k8s, you are probably in a large org. If you are in a large org, you are probably interm

Right but this is the irony I think. If you need the scale provided by k8s, you are probably in a large org. If you are in a large org, you are probably intermediated from running k8s directly by some kind of devops/cloudops team who needs to sort out all the "hard administration stuff" you listed. Setting up a science project at home in your toy AWS account I'm sure is no big deal. But this is true of every tech- "works on my box" is always easier than "doing this in enterprise". The measure of a technology is how easy it is to use in the real production environment.