It has the technical capability to do what Compose does, but Compose is a tool specifically designed for development workflow, and this is not the case for Kubernetes. Application developers without any infrastructure/operations experience can have a tough time understanding and learning all this new technology, and to have to get a mental model of Kubernetes to do their work is a big barrier. One simple example is that there is no direct equivalent of `docker-compose restart` in Kubernetes. The only way to restart a pod is to remove it and recreate it (or scale an RC/RS/deployment to zero and back up to force recreation.) It may just be a couple commands more, but it's unnecessary cognitive load for many app devs. Even just comparing a Docker Compose manifest file to a Kubernetes manifest file, it's more verbose because Kubernetes is more powerful and needs more details specified.