If I could trivially package them up and deploy them locally with intrinsically less effort and wall-time then the old way, that'd be amazing.
If I could somehow get the horizontal scaling promises and redundancy as some kind of built-in, like I can with say, memcache, that's be cool.
If I could do these kinds of "hard" things with them more trivially, that'd be really nice.
There's a lot of things I want them to do but it's a god-damn bull-riding rodeo every time I try to get there.
And before you reply, I know you're an expert and can do all these things trivially. That's amazing. The vast majority of the industry creates a giant fragile spaghetti knot with them and I am not a full time k8s admin nor do I want this to be a career trajectory. It should be like you know, wine, ffmpeg, imagemagick, virtualbox, lua, qemu, redis, gnuplot, lvm2, gdb, ssh, sqlite; tools like that. It's pretty easy to get them to do really nice things. Those things deliver on their promises and potential pretty nicely.
It's nice that nobody feels a need to hype curl or squid. They just work. Isn't that nice? I mean look at gdb's website: https://www.sourceware.org/gdb/ it doesn't even have CSS animations --- in fact, it doesn't even have CSS.