Trying to get a sense of whether it makes sense to run something more abstract over kubernetes - what do y'all do?
Many people try to simplify the way of deploying applications on Kubernetes, that helps developers to achieve better continuous deployment pipelines. These tools normally try to target the most common use cases where most of the applications would fall into, like automatically creating a Deployment, a Service and some Ingress rules for your application.
On this space, there are many tools like deis workflow, kel, to help you create kubernetes resources (like Deployment, Service, etc). You can even choose to use a full platform on top of Kubernetes like Openshift, which adds some steps that complete software delivery workflows like building the applications in the first place.
Finally, many people rely on Helm which is a templating system that allows you to easily generate the required k8s manifests to create k8s resources.
So yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to abstract away some of the internal details of Kubernetes, just for the sake of simplicity.