> My real complaint is that none of these give you a way to do persistence that doesn't destroy some other really nice properties of containers.

100% agree with you there.

> It mostly just keeps them even with Kubernetes at best. And an imitation of it at worst.

Personally, when I looked at kubernetes, mesos, etc and saw the xml hell that i'd be living in and said "no way".

If i have to run something as complex as those to have docker then it's not worth it to me.

When I look at the new docker swarm stuff. For the first time I think that docker is a viable thing (assuming it all works). because I'm not adding additional complexity to get my docker simplicity.