I run kops in production, and while we've had issues, the authors are responsive and super helpful. The problems we've encountered have more frequently been with k8s itself than kops; mostly been fire and forget except when I've gotta debug which experimental feature I tried to enable broke kops' expectations (or just broke). Ping me in the channels @justinsb mentioned if you want advice.

We're at three live and two dead (decommissioned) clusters with a two man team, and while we regret some decisions, most of the time it just works.