My anecdotal experience: I only started working with Docker and distributed systems in January and I've been through a couple iterations of provisioning, deployment, and orchestration since then - started with docker-machine and docker-compose, added in swarm, private registries, and a set of bash scripts, now moving to kubernetes - and I am finding that kubernetes handles many tricky components out of the box with very little effort. I wouldn't have understood how to use it four months ago but now that I've implemented much of it myself I understand the underlying architecture and design goals and find it to be a better solution than the tools I've put together. It took me a few days to see if it would do everything I needed and understand how to configure it, which I suppose could be seen as complexity, but it took me much longer to understand how to run docker in production in the first place since I had to learn and build it all without prior knowledge. Kubernetes has been a cakewalk in comparison. If I ever need to set up a cluster from scratch again I'll be using k8s.

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

We're always looking to improve on both complexity and documentation - but, as Kelsey pointed out in his tutorial, it's definitely got a few steps. The biggest question is would you really want any fewer? That is to say, you could use a hosted solution (like Google Container Engine) or set up with a one-line command, but most people who want to run at production scale definitely want individual steps so they can customize.