I agree it's a mess. We have docker swarm, docker compose, "regular" docker, the Moby fiasco. I'm just waiting for Enterprise Docker Faces to surface at this point.

Kubernetes isn't that great but it's less of a disaster than the current docker ecosystem.

I'm convinced another player will come in taking the best of both and give us something reasonable to work with. Maybe in 5 years or so...

Istio looks promising. The missing piece has always been convenient inter-container communication. I think something with mesh and gRPC baked into the core for strong service contracts would blow everyone else away.