It obviously happens some times [1] [2], but it should be more common...
[1] http://alvinhenrick.com/2014/08/18/apache-storm-and-kafka-cl...
A complex kafka setup is pretty involved (relatively speaking) and becomes domain specific pretty quickly, at which point, it probably becomes less usable / understandable to someone who is trying to learn / get interested.
On the whole, I agree with you. Some of the open source software that exists now is truly amazing and I think lots of people are defaulting to less-the-optimal solutions because they just don't have exposure to the latest and greatest.
But in it's current state, that patch is a starting point that is really intended more for Kafka developers than for Kafka users. I really like what the Mesosphere folks have done -- great variety of OSes and cloud platforms, plus they do all the heavy lifting of bringing the cluster up for you.