disclaimer: I work on project Rook.

Yes building a whole new data path is complicated and takes many years to get right. Its also somewhat of a moving target with new storage technologies appearing on the scene (like SMR drives, NVME, and persistent memory).

It would be much more effective for the community to coalesce around a common data path just like we coalesce around kernels. Something like Ceph is a great start, its battle-tested and has storage vendors (like Intel, Samsung, SanDisk and others) updating/optimizing it for new kinds of storage.

The focus on simplicity and integration into cloud-native environments is critical however and Torus' vision was spot on. Kudos to the CoreOS team for raising the bar on this.