I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's incredibly easy to use while providing all the baseline features I actually need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very similar niche.

In fact, part of the appeal may be that they don't use openstack, because openstack implementations to date have all been quite limited and complicated so far.