> ease of development by not throwing thousand of options in front of your screen.

This! i don't want to spend my life navigating the maze of options and hidden costs of AWS et al, this is important to most projects for two reasons - time and cognitive load... Until things get truly massive scale, it's not worth the brain drain and time is more precious. Navigating the interface of Linode is actually pleasant and takes minimum effort.

If anyone needs a reason not to use AWS for your boss in a nutshell: employee sanity.