This is much more the real story but I doubt most folks will ever hear it.

Totally agree. Mesos project always had a trouble with governance and didn't build out the larger community the way other projects did. If they had built that coalition, made the project more accessible to others, who knows, maybe it would have gone differently.

Then again, k8s succeeded in part due to the Google reputation (even if undeserved) and it's use of GoLang. I always found Mesos' use of C++ meant many of the users (often developing in Java, Go, or Node) just wouldn't contribute.