[mwcampbell]

I can't speak for the GP with certainty, but maybe the source of the disappointment is that with Midori, you built a new OS from the ground up, throwing out all the accumulated cruft and doing it all in an elegant, unified way. On the other hand, Pulumi is just another layer on top of a cloud stack (or stacks) that many people see as too complex already.

I see the wisdom in it, though. Most developers these days aren't shipping their own servers off to a data center. And for those that want bare metal, there are providers that offer bare metal servers provisioned through a CRUD API, so Pulumi should be able to work with those.