Yes, they're pretty ugly TBH. All they've done is provide some decent "canned" estimators but for anything custom you're still using the base tensorflow API. Not to mention feeding in something like numpy arrays > 2GB is a huge pain (their Dataset API doesn't fully work).

Interesting. So do you recommend Keras+Tf as well, or drop Tensorflow altogether ?

Keras + MxNet is far better. It's faster, you get multi-gpu out of the box, and it's reaaaally easy to export to ONNX for fast inference elsewhere.