Ha, I can at least assure you we're not oblivious. Nomad has a product manager from Mesosphere and most of HashiCorp's products integrate deeply with Kubernetes. We're well aware Kubernetes is the juggernaut to which every other scheduler has succumbed.
I believe there's room for both Nomad and Kubernetes. Whether as competitors or complements, having more than one vibrant project in the orchestration space will hopefully make all the projects better for users. Any one project has to make tradeoffs that improve the user experience for some while degrading it for others. For example Kubernetes has an IP-per-Pod network abstraction which provides an excellent out of the box PaaS-like experience for microservices in the cloud. On the other hand Nomad's more flexible network model more easily supports networks outside of flat cloud topologies whether it's small home raspberrypi clusters or globally distributed edge compute.
What I was calling out is the abundance of people who claim it is the greatest thing since the tech equivalent of sliced bread, and love to point out how simple it is despite requiring the need for Consul to run it at enterprise scale and likely also Vault if you need secret management in any form, which then also needs Consul if you want to run it at scale. I have intimate experience with running Vault and Consul and have advised colleagues for the better part of 2 years on utilising Vault (either as basic secrets management or some of its more advanced features). IIRC the recommendation from HC is also running a third Consul cluster for service discovery. If running Nomad at scale is anything like Vault, then it isn't as simple as people make it out to be, never mind the fact that you'll probably be running 5 different clusters of 3 different products to provide functionality that doesn't fulfill half of what Kubernetes gives.
The complexity of setting up a Nomad cluster due to Vault and Consul being soft requirements is very real and something we're hoping to (finally!) make progress on in the coming months.
the only thing which is not so easy is LoadBalancing to extern i.e. kube-vip/metallb both can be a pain (externalTrafficPolicy: Local is still a shit show). k3s basically creates a k8s cluster with everything except good load balancing over multiple nodes
Nomad does not have a first class LoadBalancing concept in keeping with its unopinionated network model, although we may add ingress/loadbalancing someday. Right now most people use Traefik or Nginx with Consul for ingress, and Consul Connect is popular for internal service mesh. Obviously unfortunate extra complexity over having it builtin, but Nomad has been focused more on core scheduling than these ancillary services so far.
Hard[0] disagree[1] on this[2]. Nomad is a direct competitor of Kubernetes.
[0] https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/nomad-vs-kubernetes
[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/a-kubernetes-user-s-guide-to-...
[2] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/nomad-kubernetes-a-pragmatic-...
There have been lots of speeding, hard-to-catch bullets in the past.
Kubernetes has become a speeding bullet, it won't be easy to catch and it has to run through a lot of walls to slow down for a competitor to do any damage to it's dominance.