I agree that operational simplicity will sell this to more organizations than performance will. There just aren't that many companies in the world that are bumping up against the scaling limits of Kafka.

When I look at the landing page of vectorized.io it touts the speed repeatedly without mentioning this simplicity pitch you find deeper in the site:

Redpanda is a single binary you can scp to your servers and be done. We got rid of Zookeeper®, the JVM and garbage collection for a streamlined, predictable system.

That does sound great! Put that information right up front.