I'm trying to set up a cluster in our development environment to play around with in preparation for rolling it to staging and production. So, minikube I have ruled out because it doesn't prove out the most critical parts of what we will need to run it in production.

I do have a lot of infrastructure and networking experience, it was mostly a matter of the ingress setup having many moving parts which were poorly documented. I could see that it had set up bridges and iptables rules and NAT and virtual interfaces, but I was never able to get a picture of how the setup was supposed to work to be able to see what parts of that picture were right or wrong.

There was no clear road-map of setting up a cluster. Most people talking about Kubernetes were doing "toy" deployments, which only had limited application to what I was doing. I only found kubespray because of a passing mention, for example.

I'd say your about right with a month. Had I given it another week or two, I probably would have gotten it going. I had really only expected it to take a couple days to have a proof of concept cluster, so at 2 weeks I was way beyond what I had slotted to spend on it.

Looking over the Getting Started Guide it looks very simple to get a test cluster set up. Which maybe set my expectations unreasonably high.

I guess that's what I'm trying to say: With the current state of documentation, it's probably a calendar month investment to get going.