For example the work that was done on their seccomp filtering and apparmor profiles.
My guess would be that it's as User namespacing can introduce some issues (e.g. where mounting host filesystems), that they've decided the trade-offs aren't worth it.
Also looking at the CRI-O trello (https://trello.com/c/Ak2yMcpf/714-epic-cri-o-support-for-use...) it seems like user namespaces isn't even an option there yet?
Unless you are a giant enterprise shop with the resources to staff a decent sized K8s team, you should use the hosted solutions.
It's not just a matter of enabling user ns. There is no support at the vfs layer for uid/gid mapping. This means in order to use it, images must be chowned with the remapped ID's. Per-container mappings are not supported for this reason (it would require copying and chowning the entire image for each container mapping).
Do you care to qualify your statement about CRI-O?
Disclaimer: I worked at Docker for 3 years.
On the other hand the container runtime is straightforward. I recently discovered that one can run a docker image with a bash script and the unshare command and get a very tight security setup. That explains proliferation of various alternatives to Docker to run its images.