I created this (I'm the Chief Architect and Co-founder of Rancher Labs, I experiment with stuff like this all the time). The purpose of this project is really to embed in another project (https://github.com/rancher/rio is an example) but as a side effect it's a nice little standalone k8s package. I never had any intention to support it as a standalone project, but hey if somebody is interested who knows.

All of the features removed are based off of two basic ideas

1) If there are X ways to do something, I choose the best one (obviously subjective). 2) The features are not commonly used or really shouldn't be in k8s to begin with.

The end goal of what I'm working on is basically to use k8s code as a library to do orchestration. Step one was to reduce the footprint of k8s (I'm 80% there with this project), step two is to completely rework the state management such that you no longer need to persist state in k8s. This is a much larger goal. I've fooled around a lot with the persistence layer in k8s (this project is running on sqlite3) so I'm basically doing a lot of work of figuring what state I can throw away. The theory is that all desired state comes from your yaml files. Actual state is actual (what really exists). Everything else in k8s should be purely derived and not important.