The CNCF survey says "lack of internal expertise" is the top GitOps pain point. I call that a vanity metric. It's a symptom.
The real pain points are tool failure modes that burn the few experts you have. Where's the data on that?
* How many teams actually achieve the promised "self-service" for devs? Or does the platform team just become a bottleneck managing Argo/Flux CRD spaghetti?
* Survey talks about "security concerns." That's abstract. I want the concrete failures: a secret manager operator crashing and wiping all `SealedSecret` mappings, or a misconfigured OPA/Gatekeeper rule bricking a production rollout.
* They mention "rollback challenges." Is that because your GitOps tool can't handle a failed sync state without manual `kubectl` intervention? That's a tool problem, not an expertise problem.
If the biggest blocker is expertise, then the tools are failing at their core promise: to simplify. Prove me wrong with actual performance data, not survey sentiment.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.